Standards and Testing

The centerpiece of the bill is the requirement that states develop and implement "challenging" academic standards in reading and math, set annual statewide progress objectives to ensure that all groups of students reach proficiency within 12 years, and then test children annually in grades 3 through 8, in reading and math, to measure their progress. The bill specifically prohibits any "national testing" or "federally controlled curriculum." It is up to the states to select and/or design their own tests, and to make sure that the tests are aligned with the state curriculum standards. States will receive federal funds to help develop their tests, and a "trigger mechanism" specifies that states are not required to develop the reading and math tests for grades 3-8 if the federal government fails to provide the necessary funding.

Reporting Results

The test results will be made public in annual "report cards" on how schools are performing and how states are progressing overall toward their proficiency objectives. To help ensure that all groups of students are progressing at an adequate rate, the test results must be broken out and reported according to poverty, race, ethnicity, disability, and limited English proficiency. This is known as "disaggregation of data," and is intended to prevent schools from lumping test results together in an overall average for the school, effectively hiding the achievement gaps between groups of students.

Adequate Yearly Progress and Accountability

States will have until the 2005-06 school year to develop and implement their tests. Once in place, schools and districts will be required to show "adequate yearly progress" [A.Y.P.] toward their statewide objectives -- that is, they must demonstrate (through their test scores) that they are on course to reach 100 percent proficiency for all groups of students within 12 years. The states themselves decide what is proficient and what is an adequate rate of progress for each group. Those schools that fall behind may be subject to various "school improvement," "corrective action," or "restructuring" measures imposed by the state. Underperforming schools may avoid such measures if they can demonstrate a 10 percent reduction in the number of students that are not meeting the annual proficiency goals.

An Independent Benchmark

Each state's test results will also be compared against an independent benchmark called the National Assessement of Educational Progress (NAEP), which will be given to a small sample of each state's 4th and 8th-grade students in reading and math every other year. This provision, known as "NAEP comparability," is supposed to ensure that states are not setting the bar too low on their standards and tests. That is, if a state shows progress on its statewide test results but does not show comparable progress on the NAEP, it would suggest that the state's standards and tests are not challenging enough. The final legislation, however, does not provide for any penalties if a state's test scores fall behind relative to its NAEP results, but merely requires that the comparative results will be made public.