No child left behind: how to ace those tests.

One reason that the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act is important and promising is that it focuses on reading. By the same token, one reason that NCLB sometimes distorts education for the worse is that it focuses on reading. The paradox arises from the fact that our schools do not yet fully understand what they need to do to raise reading scores. Many have accepted that phonics is best taught systematically. That's a plus. But goaded by the new law, many schools are intensively doing counterproductive things like strategy exercises and test prep that can not significantly improve reading comprehension.

Reading is the key to most academic achievement. Hence the emphasis of NCLB is welcome, as is its insistence on accountability through student tests. For, despite the chorus of complaints about standard reading tests, they are very reliable: they correlate highly with each other, and they accurately measure real-world reading ability.

The negative, unintended consequences of NCLB have emerged, not so much from the law itself but from the failure of our schools of education to instruct teachers and administrators in the true nature of reading achievement. Anxious educators have turned elementary schools into test-prep factories. In California, for example, the state has mandated that students spend at least 150 minutes each day on reading in the early grades. A great deal of this time is spent on trivial tales and on constantly repeated content-poor exercises in "classifying" and "finding the main idea." The desperate response of the schools to test pressure has been to excise history, science, and the arts and replace them with still more such exercises in reading. This is a futile strategy since reading achievement depends on broad knowledge of history, science, and the ...