No Child Left Behind is coming up for renewal, and there is a tough choice to make - keep it, leave, it, or change it?

Why do politicians cling to No Child Left Behind? There's a few reasons.

For one, it was a bipartisan success. Both parties had a stake in writing it, so now they both have a stake in salvaging it.

It helps build an "hands on" image for government in terms of education.

If there are problems with our education system, politicians need to look like they are doing something. No Child Left Behind is perfect for politicians because it gives measurable accountability, measurable "improvements," and specific punishments for "failures."

The problem with this, and the reason we should adjust the law, is that those goals of politicians are at odds with the goals of educators, parents, and students.

Standardized tests look great on statistical reports of school success, but they do little to capture the essence of what an individual child is learning. The high stakes nature of these tests can be detrimental to children by letting their future ride on the success or failure of one test.

It also creates some sticky situations for teachers, in which teaching to the test and possibly even cheating are superior alternatives to real teaching. Don't think that high stakes testing causes teachers to cheat for their students? Read Freakonomics. It's a simple piece of logic - if a school's future rests on student success, it will ensure that students succeed no matter what.

So what is good about No Child Left Behind?

The push for accountability is laudable. Parents and politicians need to know that schools are working to effectively educate all of our children. In order to salvage this and create real accountability, we need to engineer real measures of student success.

One such alternative to standardized tests is portfolios of student work. Students should be creating works that demonstrate their mastery of content knowledge and disciplinary skills. Take these products and organize them into an electronic portfolio that is viewable online by the public.

If we want to know how well are students are learning to communicate in Language Arts and Literacy, we should not look to their HSPA scores. We should look to a portfolio of creative writing and journalistic accounts. We should watch a video of them acting out a play. We should listen to them deliver a pod cast about current events.

Politicians don't like this type of assessment because it is not easily standardize-able. You can't quantify authentic assessments. You can only experience them and assess in a holistic way whether or not they evidence real learning.

There's still a way to compromise and combine the goals of educators with the goals of politicians. If a school can generate portfolios for all of its students (each grade level would be best, but at least at each "benchmark" level that the government wants to measure), the government can appoint officials to evaluate a sample of student portfolios.

Randomly assess 2-3% of the students, and if they are satisfactory the school is doing a great job. If not, look more closely at a larger sample and try to decide what is going wrong.

Learn more about this author, B. Rock.
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