The future of NCLB.

No Child Left Behind is a monument to what we can accomplish when we bring accountability, high standards, and unprecedented funding to our schools. And as all your analysts ultimately agreed, it is a monument we must stand behind ("Do We Repair the Monument?" Forum, Spring 2005).

NCLB starts with the premise that all students, regardless of race, income, or special need, can and should achieve high standards. If you believe every child can learn in school, then it makes perfect sense to expect every child to be proficient in reading and math by 2014. To call this goal unrealistic is to abandon millions of children to what President Bush has so aptly termed the soft bigotry of low expectations.

While we want to be as flexible as possible, we will not backtrack and lower standards. If we do, children will fall behind, and our monument will stand for nothing but an empty promise. That would be a terrible shame because we can already see that this law is making a difference. Across the country, scores are rising, and the achievement gap is closing.

It is like the saying, what gets measured gets done. We must continue to assess every student every year. But let me be clear: We do not believe in a federal test. No Child Left Behind calls for each state to set its own academic standards in the best interests of its own students. We simply provide the funds for these assessments and ask for accountability for results in return.

Already we are seeing the states make real progress. Pennsylvania has gone from 61 percent of schools meeting their academic goals to 81 percent; California, from 54 percent to 64 percent; and Georgia, from 64 percent to 78 percent.

Now we want to bring the benefits of this law to our high schools by expanding on its principles of accountability, flexibility, choice, and research-based practices. Using those pillars, we can help ensure that a high-school diploma once again represents a ticket to success.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

We face serious challenges. Just 68 out of every 100 9th graders will graduate from high school on time. And the vast majority of these students are unprepared for higher education. As a result, out of those 100 original 9th-grade students, only 27 are still enrolled in college in their sophomore year. With 80 percent of the fastest-growing jobs requiring some postsecondary education, we face a crisis.

That is why the president has proposed a $1.5 billion High School Initiative to ensure every student graduates ready for college or the workforce of the 21st century. We need to annually assess our high-school students, so we can intervene before a problem sets a student behind for life.

Now is not the time to chisel away at No Child Left Behind. We need to build on its foundations and extend the promise of high standards and accountability to all of our students. Together, we can give every child a quality education.

CHRIS DOHERTY 

Chief of Staff/Office of Elementary and Secondary Education

U.S. Department of Education

NCLB is scheduled to be revisited by Congress in 2007 and I don't believe it should be "reopened" before that time. Doing so would give lobbyists and reform opponents the opportunity to water down the accountability that is the heart and soul of the law.

When it is ultimately revisited, however, Congress will have a chance to shape NCLB's parental choice requirements and make them more useful and valuable to parents and children. That's not to say that I believe for a moment the parental options in the current law are not useful or valuable. In fact, what makes NCLB the most important education legislation in a generation is its recognition that in the hands of caring parents and concerned taxpayers, information itself can be a powerful tool for reform.

For instance, parents with children in schools identified as underachieving for two or more consecutive years are guaranteed the right to obtain supplemental educational services such as private tutoring, paid for with their children's share of federal Title I funds. This provision--private tutoring--has proved to be far more popular than the other choice option in the law, transferring to another school. But during the NCLB drafting process, Senator Judd Gregg and I both wanted the supplemental services options to kick in immediately for parents, as soon as a school was identified by its state as needing improvement. We ended up with a law that came close, but didn't go quite as far as we personally preferred.

NCLB's supplemental services provisions are significant because they offer real options to some parents who previously had none and because of the precedent it sets: true Title I portability--the first time the federal government has formally established in law that "the money follows the child." Under NCLB, federal Title I dollars can legally flow to private, even faith-based education providers when selected by parents.

I believe parents should have total control over their children's share of federal Title I funds. The money belongs to the children, not to the school system or the people who run it. Preserving and expanding the Title I portability established in No Child Left Behind is one of the most important things Congress can do to ensure parents have the right to make real changes when public schools are falling short of expectations. "Sunshine"--reinforced by true parental choice--is the key to true accountability in public education.

My hope is that Congress will continue to resist the temptation to support short-sighted changes, and will insist that immediate tutoring for children in underachieving schools be adopted as part of any package of reasonable "tweaks."

REPRESENTATIVE JOHN BOEHNER

R-Ohio