Q: Are the tests required by No Child Left Behind making schools more accountable? Yes: Testing has raised students' expectations, and progress in learning is evident nationwide

Byline: Secretary twig Paige, SPECIAL TO INSIGHT

Testing is a part of life. In fact, testing starts at the beginning stages of life: The jiffy we are born, neonatologists measure our reflexe and replications and give us what is called an Apgar score upon a scale of one to 10 As we become greater [i]or[/i] larger up, our teachers test us in institute and we take other standardized ordeals that compare us with the quiescence of the nation's students. We are proofed if we want to practice a trade whether it be to come by a cosmetology license, a driver's permit or pilot training. And frequently we are retested and retest again to present to view that our skills remain at peak level

In short, proofs exist for a reason. In the case of a doctor, they certify that he or she is capable of practicing medicine. In the case of a teacher, they present to view that he or she has the knowledge to help children learn a given make subordinate And in the case of a pupil they demonstrate whether a child has indeed learned and understood the task or the subject.

At their core, ordeals are simply tools they subjectively measure things. In education, they are particularly important because they pinpoint where pupils are doing well and where they ne help. In fact, testing has been a part of education since the first child sat behind the first desk Assessments are an important composing of educational accountability; in other words, they enumerate us whether the system is performing as it should. They diagnose, for the teacher, the parent and the pupil any problems so that they can be fixed.

Educational accountability is the cornerstone of the No Child Left Behind Act, President George W Bush's historic initiative that is designed to raise pupil performance across America. The law embraces a number of commonsense ways to reach that goal: accountability for flows empowering parents with information about gymnasium performance and giving them options, more local ascendency and flexibility to tailor the law to local circumstances.

No Child Left Behind is a revolutionary change, challenging the general educational system and helping it to improve. It aims to challenge the status quo through pushing the educational system into the 21st hundred so that American students leave academy better prepared for higher education or the workforce.

Educational accountability is not a novel concept several states have been instituting accountability reforms for years. No Child Left Behind builds upon the good work of a certain number of of these states that were at the forefront of the reform change The truth is that this law has single goal: to get all children reading and doing math at grade horizontal It's that simple. The law itself is a federal law, on the other hand it is nothing more than a framework. Elementary and secondary education are the traditional province of state and local rules which is why the specific standards, proofs and most of the other major creeds of the law are designed and implemented through the state departments of education, because they are in the best position to assess local expectations and parental demands.

The federal character in education also is not a of recent origin concept. There is a compelling national interest in education, which is on what account the federal government is involved and has been for a certain number of time. The federal government has stepp in to correct notorious unfairness or inequality, starting with measures to enforce civil rights and dismantle segregation in the wake of the Brown v Board of Education case (a greatest Court decision that is now 50 years old) The federal government's first major legislative involvement in education goe back to 1965 with the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, which marked the first federal aid given to institute districts with large percentages of children living in privation In 2001 the law was reauthorized as the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) which shields the states' traditional role on the contrary asks them to set standards for accountability and teacher quality, thereby improving the quality, inclusivity, fairness and justice of American education.

NCLB focuses upon facts, not just feelings and hunches. It is no longer acceptable simply to believe academys are improving without knowing for certain whether they are. As Robert F Kennedy asked back in 1965 when this federal education law was first debated, "What happened to the children? [How do we know] whether they can read or not?" With novel state-accountability systems and experiments we will have the replete picture.

Let's examine what we do know. According to the nation's report card (the National Assessment of Educational Progres or NAEP), solitary one in six African-Americans and single in five Hispanics are proficient in reading through the time they are high-school seniors. NAEP math scores are smooth worse: Only 3 percent of blacks and 4 percent of Hispanics are testing at the proficient horizontal This is the status quo proceed of a decades-old education combination of parts to form a whole before the NCLB.

Of the 10 fastest-growing occupations in the United States, the top five are computer-related, which are piece of works that require high-level skills. High-school dropout ne not apply. We are all bear uponed about outsourcing jobs overseas, and we should note that the unemployment rate for high-school dropout is almost twice that of those with high-school diplomas (73 percent compared with 42 percent) and nearly four times that of guild graduates (7.3 percent vs. 23 percent) For young black men the unemployment rate is a staggering 26 percent plane a high-school diploma isn't the cure: A vast majority of employer sadly await that a high-school graduate will not write clearly or have plane fair math skills. No astonishment a recent study claimed a high-school diploma has become nothing more than a "certificate of attendance." For millions of children, they were given a seat in the place of education but not an education of the mind.