State testing standards under federal review.

So far, Delaware and South Carolina had their state standards and assessment requirements under the No Child Left Behind law OK'd by the U.S. Department of Education.

But Oregon and Indiana have to return to the drawing board. And as of mid-April, the other 46 states had yet to have their standards reviewed.

This school year is the first year that the federal government is requiring states to have schools test every student in grades 3 through 8 under NCLB. Prior, states only had to test once in elementary school, once in middle school and once in high school, according to Chad Colby, a department spokesman. South Carolina was already testing in grades 3 through 8 prior to this year, Colby notes.

After states submit the standards and assessments used, external peer reviewers in the education community and the Education Department evaluate each plan.

In Oregon's case, for example, it had failed to meet achievement standards because they were set before academic content standards. "It is essential that the academic achievement standards be developed based on the current grade-level content standards," states Henry L. Johnson, assistant secretary of elementary and secondary education, in a letter to Oregon.

Delaware's plan meets requirements of NCLB in part because it includes alternate achievement standards for students with the most significant cognitive disabilities.

Chattanooga's Choice

Just before No Child Left Behind was signed into law, several elementary schools in the Hamilton County School District in Chattanooga, Tenn. were on the lowest achievement scale, according to Superintendent Jesse Register.

Just before Hamilton merged with the Chattanooga district schools in 1997, the teacher union's conditions had created a "revolving door" in low performing schools where new teachers were leaving after one to three years of service. So administrators worked with the union to create a scenario where high quality teachers were in the most-needed schools.

Two changes were made: Administrators and the union agreed to a recruitment incentive that gave $5,000 a year to high quality teachers to teach in inner city schools for at least three years and the schools that started to show measurable gains on tests also gave $1,000 to $2,000 to every teacher in the building.

Test scores rose so that the second lowest performing school six years ago was the first school to move completely off the NCLB warning list and now all nine schools are in the top 10 percent of schools in the state, Register says. He attributes it in part to the more experienced teachers. "The key to success is having quality teachers and good leadership," Register adds.

Tech Literacy Gets Popular

How to measure proficiency among students with information and communication technology?

TechLiteracy Assessment, an online assessment tool to measure elementary and middle school students' tech savvy, recently came on the market, www.learning.com/tla, while NETS Online Technology Assessment helps teachers measure student skills in using software and helps measure student progress toward meeting the National Educational Technology Standards for Students, or NETS-S. ISTE's NETS Project is designed to enable stakeholders in preK-12 education to develop national standards for educational uses of technology, www.cnets.iste.org

And ProfilerPro evaluates knowledge, attitude and skill based on simple surveys implemented via the Web.

www.profilerpro.com

Showing Improvement

Percentage of Benwood Schools (Chattanooga, Tenn.)
students scoring proficient or advanced in TCAP
reading and math achievement scores

                2003   2004   2005

Reading/
Language Arts    57%    63%    77%
Mathematics      54%    62%    69%

Source: Hamilton County (Tenn.) School District