No Child Left Behind law aiding test scores?

WASHINGTON — The nation's students have performed significantly better on state reading and math tests since President Bush signed his landmark education initiative into law five years ago, according to a major independent study released Tuesday.

The study's authors warned that it is difficult to say whether or how much the No Child Left Behind law is driving the achievement gains. But Republican and Democratic supporters of the law said the findings indicate it has been a success. Some said the findings bolster the odds that Congress will renew the controversial law this year.

"This study confirms that No Child Left Behind has struck a chord of success with our nation's schools and students," Education Secretary Margaret Spellings said in a statement. "We know the law is working, so now is the time to reauthorize."

The report concluded that the achievement gap between black and white students is shrinking in many states and that the pace of student gains increased after the law was enacted. The research was conducted by the nonpartisan Center on Education Policy, which in recent years has issued several reports that have found fault with how the law was implemented.

Jack Jennings, president of the D.C.-based center and a former Democratic congressional aide, said a decade of school-improvement efforts at local, state and national levels has contributed to achievement gains.

"No Child Left Behind, though, is clearly part of the mix of reforms whose fruit we are now seeing," he said.

Some skeptics said the study overstated the extent of academic gains. Others said the law should not be credited for the positive results.

"There are a lot of problems with No Child Left Behind that we need to fix because they work against some of the progress that is being noted in this study," said Edward McElroy, president of the American Federation of Teachers, a 1.3 million-member union.

The law requires all public-school students to be tested in reading and math every year from grades three through eight and once in high school, and it prescribes a series of sanctions on schools that do not make adequate progress. States are allowed to design their own tests and set their own standards.

Researchers for the study spent 18 months gathering data from the states, much of which was verified and brought together for the first time.

Conclusions were drawn from states that administered comparable tests for at least three years. Gaps in the data meant that not all states were included in evaluations of certain subjects and grade levels.

The study found that gains tended to be larger in math than in reading and larger at the elementary level than in middle and high school.

In elementary math, 37 out of 41 states with adequate data showed significant gains. In middle-school reading, such increases were found in 20 out of 39 states, and in high-school reading in 16 out of 37.

Still, these gains fall well short of the law's ambitious goal of getting all students performing at grade level or better by 2014, said the report.

The study also found that 14 of 38 states with sufficient data showed shrinking gaps in reading scores between black and white students and that there was no evidence of a widening achievement gap in that subject in other states. The researchers cautioned that the gaps remain enormous, with black students scoring as many as 30 percentage points, on average, behind white students in some states.

The analysis also found that test-score gains accelerated after enactment of No Child Left Behind in nine of the 13 states with sufficient data.

Some scholars criticized the report's methodology. Bruce Fuller, a professor of education and public policy at the University of California, Berkeley, said it made little sense to draw conclusions when so few states have adequate data. He also said the researchers overstated small gains and did not adequately address states that he said have been dumbing down standards.