BUT DO DEMOCRATS HAVE THE COURAGE OF W'S CONVICTIONS?:

'No Child' in Action: Rising Scores Show Why We Can't Retreat (Margaret Spellings, May 4, 2009, Washington Post)

Student achievement results from the "nation's report card" published last week show that we are on the right track. Since enactment of the bipartisan No Child Left Behind Act, which called for all students to be on grade level in reading and math by 2014, students have been making progress in reading and math in elementary and middle school. Improvement has been greatest for African American and Hispanic students and those students who are lowest-achieving. [...]

It's no accident that the United States has had nine straight years of increasing scores for elementary school students. In the decades before No Child Left Behind was signed into law in 2002 and the state reforms that led to it, taxpayers spent hundreds of billions of dollars on education and hoped for the best. Since No Child Left Behind, we have expected results. The law required that every student in grades three through eight be assessed annually in reading and math, that those results be disaggregated and that the information be provided to educators and parents. And that is exactly the age group for which we are seeing results. Consider: In the 10 years since 1999, reading scores for 9-year-olds have risen eight points; in the nearly three decades before that, scores rose only four points. In the past 10 years, math scores have increased 11 points, while in the nearly three decades prior, scores rose only 13 points.

Teachers and principals who have embraced accountability have made these increases possible. And while this is good progress, we should not be satisfied. The achievement gap continues to plague our country. Because of the state and federal assessment data we now have, we know precisely which districts, schools, teachers and students need help and which are doing well. We've diagnosed the problem -- the approximately 4,000 schools that have failed to meet their annual goals for five straight years and the 2,000 high schools that produce more than half of all dropouts. Now we have to deal with those chronically low-performing schools -- the ones that need more than just tinkering around the edges.