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More than 40 organizations – including the NAACP, the National Council of La Raza, and the National Urban League – recently the Senate to maintain tough testing and accountability in any NCLB re-write. The Congressional Tri-Caucus, which is composed of the Congressional Black, Hispanic, and Asian Pacific American caucuses, followed suit in a that calls for the Senate to strengthen the accountability aspects of its NCLB re-authorization draft.

Meanwhile, a vocal minority within the civil rights community has mobilized in opposition.

In a series of op-eds published in,, and the, Judith Browne Dianis of the Advancement Project, John H. Jackson of the Schott Foundation and Pedro Noguera of NYU have sharply criticized the civil rights groups’ support of testing. So has the Network for Public Education – a group founded by Diane Ravitch – which put out a opposing “high-stakes testing” that was signed by a handful of local civil rights groups, including the Washington and Oregon state chapters of the NAACP.

There is in fact a great deal of evidence that test-based accountability can improve student learning. At the same time skeptics have a point when they NCLB created perverse incentives to cheat and teach to the test. A close look at the research shows that policymakers ought to learn from each side as they attempt to craft a new law.

The basic idea of NCLB accountability is to schools – by, for example, firing the principal or allowing students to transfer to different schools – that don’t meet certain benchmarks for student performance (called “adequate yearly progress” or AYP).

The empirical evidence generally suggests that this aspect of the law improved student achievement in math. In one study, researchers  performance on the – a no-stakes national test that is generally seen as not susceptible to cheating or other forms of gaming – between states that already had NCLB-style accountability to states that didn’t embrace accountability until the federal government made them. The thesis was that if NCLB were working, states with newly implemented accountability systems would show the most growth. Indeed, that’s exactly what happened with math performance, particularly for low-income students.

A different compared public schools to Catholic schools (which are not subject to NCLB), and compared states with large numbers of schools required to make changes because of the law to states with fewer such schools. Once again, the researchers report that NCLB led to increases in student achievement on math tests.

Yet another compared schools just above and just below the threshold – meaning the two groups were virtually identical – at which NCLB sanctions against a school were put in place.¹ The paper found positive effects of sanctions on student growth, particularly among low-performing students.

It’s true that NCLB is not a slam dunk. There is that suggests NCLB did not close the achievement gap, and some of the studies that do judge it favorably can be critiqued for their approaches. But, by and large, there is little doubt accountability has had a on student achievement, particularly in math.

has occurred; some districts focusing on struggling students; participation in music classes among some disadvantaged students; effective teachers schools that face accountability pressure; more students for special education, low-income ones; “teaching to the test” has; and effective teachers moved out of lower grades and into tested grades.

That’s a long list, but some of the more dire predictions prompted by NCLB have not been realized. Teacher job satisfaction and neither did.

The emphasis going forward should be on how future policy can be designed to enhance the benefits and lower the costs of test-based accountability. This can be done by on how much students grow as opposed to where they finish, and monitoring and special education classification rates. Policymakers also need to ensure schools are rated on that make teaching to the test difficult or unnecessary, create” for schools that consider non-test based measures of success, and don’t penalize schools with poor students or students with disabilities.

Instead, much of the conversation about reauthorization is focused on debates about and, important topics, but not ones that directly address what we’ve learned from 14 years of NCLB research. So yes, mainstream civil rights groups are on target in pointing to the benefits of accountability. But perhaps the divide among civil rights supporters, would not be nearly as large if each side could see both the successes and failures of NCLB.

Surely Congress could benefit from doing so as well.

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