Standardized achievement tests are crucial to No Child Left Behind's school reform effort because the legislation requires states to use these tests to measure whether students meet state standards. When insufficient percentages of students pass state tests, schools are judged as failing to make adequate yearly progress. And if they fail to make sufficient progress two or more years in a row, schools—and the educators who work in them—face increasingly severe consequences. At the heart of this accountability system is extensive testing of students in grades 3–8 and in one high school grade in reading and math.

Because schools tend to teach what's tested—especially when the test scores have consequences for teachers and principals—the content of the tests required by No Child Left Behind (NCLB) has become the focus of teaching and learning in public school classrooms throughout the United States. That focus would be fine if states administered tests that measured the sorts of skills and knowledge that would lead to a first-class education for every public school student, the result that NCLB advocates have asserted the law would produce.

But states don't usually administer those kinds of tests. The magnitude of NCLB's testing requirements, the law's demanding deadlines, insufficient federal funding, and other factors have produced a different result: Many states have adopted tests that can be constructed quickly and inexpensively. These tests primarily measure low-level skills, such as recall and restatement of facts, at the expense of synthesis, analysis, and other higher-order skills. Educators increasingly are focusing on the same low-level reading and math skills in their classrooms.

NCLB's goal is to raise instructional standards by requiring states to set challenging expectations for what students should know and be able to do. But many of the tests that states have introduced under NCLB are leading instruction in the opposite direction.

Read the entire article in the November 2006 issue of ASCD Educational Leadership.