The NCLB Act should there be standard testing

This article is from USA Today

http://www.usatoday.com/news/education/2007-06-06-schools-main_N.htm



No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) has a deadline of 2014 for states to make public school students proficient in reading and math; however each state decides the way to meet the goal. Some states have strategies to disguise how well students are doing as measured by the one federal test.
In Mississippi every fourth grader knows how to read. However, in Massachusetts only half can read.
The 2002 NCLB act was meant to raise the standards of education for the entire country by punishing schools that do not perform well. The law allowed each state to set its own rules.
According to the Gannett News Service (GNS) analysis of test scores, many states have made the test easy to fool the parents that their children are prepared to move on to college.
GNS found that in Mississippi 89% of fourth grade children passed the state test for reading in 2005, but only 18% passed the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) test. This 71% gap is the widest in the nation.
Massachusetts had one of the smallest gaps, with 50% of the fourth grade kids passing the state test and 44% passing the NAEP test.
The NAEP test is taken by a small percent of the students and includes material not covered in school.
Bruce Fuller, an education and public policy professor at the University of California at Berkeley. Fuller states that the gap as actually widened since the NCLB act went into effect.
State educators deny the claims they are cheating the system by making the tests easy. They also think that their test should not be compared to the NAEP test.

Paul Vallas the chief of the Philadelphia schools thinks that there should be one set of standard tests for all.
Vallas, who took over the New Orleans schools, said that the children that fled the Gulf Coast during the hurricanes were amazed to find out that other states had tougher education standards.