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No Child Left Behind should be reauthorized for the 2007-2008 school year, but people should realize that federal laws or programs are rarely cure-alls. In addition to No Child Left Behind, the entire federal education program will need further improvement. This will require more funding than the present level.

I became a member of a rural California public school board in 1999, before No Child Left Behind was passed. Our schools had increasing numbers of children whose parents had minimal academic backgrounds; many of these children had Spanish as their primary language. In addition we had white flight to a charter school. Our teachers, although dedicated, were not equipped to do the best job teaching the new student population - the jargon used is "low socio-economic" children.

The ineffective (but diverse) teaching styles and low community expectations were reflected in the low average test scores received by our school. Many members of our community are ideologically opposed to testing. Undisciplined behavior was identified as a major problem cutting into actual teaching time. Sound familiar?

Today, 8 years later, our schools (a K-8 and a high school) have rapidly rising test scores, compare well to schools in our social demographic bracket, and in some cases do better than public schools in affluent districts. I believe that No Child Left Behind helped our community, but only because our community used it as an opportunity to improve our schools. We changed the way we did things. In some cases we tried more than one thing before we found something that really worked.

I would say there were five key factors in turning around our school.

Number 1 was leadership. The school board led the way and found appropriate administrators for the school. Our leadership style involved a consistent feedback process. We wanted to know the thoughts of students, parents, and teachers as well as administrators. We wanted to know why other school districts were succeeding or failing.

Number 2 was pragmatism. We listened to debates between advocates of phonics and whole-word reading programs. We listened to all kinds of proposals. We had only one ultimate criteria: will this raise the bar, and help kids pass that bar. We also looked at other schools that were doing a great job educating children like ours and copied them and even innovated on top of that.

Number 3 was focus. We focused the school on reading and math. We did not drop art or social studied

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