No Child Left Behind

Making the Grade: Assessing Student Learning in Education

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The Challenge:  The federal No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) requires that states implement annual tests of grade level achievement in reading and in mathematics in grades 3 through 8 plus one high school grade. While the target of NCLB is the improvement of school systems, some educators are concerned that these achievement tests are missing the improvement that individual students make from grade to grade. Thus, measures of these gains are of high interest. Creating them, however, presents a number of challenges.

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Improving Standards-Based Educational Testing: Classifying Students Based on Test Scores

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The Challenge

Standards-based testing, which assigns students to a small number of discrete performance categories, has become an important mode of communicating student assessment results for state school accountability programs. Under the federal No Child Left Behind Act, students’ categorical scores are used to assess schools’ performance with “proficiency” being the key category. As a result, the analysis of potential student classification errors is important both for students and schools.
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Internal Review of Select States' Performance Level Descriptions

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To comply with No Child Left Behind (NCLB) legislation, all states must have their assessment and accountability systems approved by July 1, 2006 through the federal peer review process.

To meet the compliance requirements, the states must

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Impact of No Child Left Behind Legislation

Impact of No Child Left Behind Legislation
The No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act was signed in 2002 and was scheduled for reauthorization in 2007. NCLB has resulted in extensive activities within the states: to develop a suitable accountability system where none may have existed, to adapt extant assessment systems, to implement supports and sanctions to encourage educational improvements, and to monitor and report on progress toward NCLB goals over time. Studies of the impact of NCLB have yielded mixed results with respect to its impact on student learning.
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