Maybe you still have nightmares about it. You’re back in elementary school, sitting at your desk. In front of you are the Iowa Tests of Basic Skills (ITBS) booklet and the green-printed answer sheet. All those empty circles. All those chances to be wrong. At your teacher’s cue, you pick up your No. 2 pencil and open the booklet. One by one, you read the questions and mull over the possible answers. Slowly, you color in the bubbles. You fill them in completely, stay inside the lines. Whenever your teacher writes the time remaining on the board, you feel a tiny flutter of panic in the pit of your stomach. What if you don’t get done in time?

Even back in the old days of testing, when our teachers assured us we wouldn’t get in trouble for a bad score, the ITBS was stressful. After Congress passed the No Child Left Behind Act in 2002, it isn’t just students who are getting butterflies during yearly standardized tests. As educators around the country hustle to maximize their students’ scores, finger-pointing predominates. Administrators, parents, students, legislators, test developers—they all have something to say and someone else to blame in a climate of growing criticism for America’s schools. In the center of this complicated standoff lies the question we have grappled unsuccessfully with throughout the 150-year history of public education in America: what should public schools teach, and who are they supposed to teach it to? How can we know if schools are failing if we can’t agree what schools are for?

Public schools started in the U.S. in the first half of the 19th century, when northern industrialization was making obsolete the old family-based modes of training and education. Students in these classes read the Bible and learned the three Rs. But those original public schools were rigid, and in some places their anti-Catholic curriculum was extremely controversial. Even today, historians disagree about whether the establishment of public schools was an attempt to realize the Founding Fathers’ vision of equal opportunity, or about controlling the “dirty and different” hordes of immigrants that were crowding the nation’s shores.

Since they started, some schools have been more successful than others. Some students have excelled and others have failed. The No Child Left Behind Act is the latest in a long history of political movements intended to make our schools stronger. Promoters say that the act will cure inequities in our school systems. Detractors say it will destroy public education in America. The reality is likely somewhere in between.

The act has helped bring important problems in our school systems out in the open and renewed discussion about how we’re educating our kids. But experts say the goals may be too lofty, the sanctions too harsh, and the focus on high-stakes standardized tests—the only objective and manageable way to chart progress on such a large scale—might actually cheat students in the long run. Some worry that the act’s emphasis on basic skills will divert school resources away from gifted children, mandating equality at the expense of excellence.  

“The whole key of No Child Left Behind is ‘closing the [achievement] gap,’” says Kris Waltman, 95PhD, associate director of the UI College of Education’s Center for Evaluation and Assessment. “There are two ways to make that gap smaller. One way is to bring the bottom up. The other is to bring the top down.”

The No Child Left Behind Act was passed as a response to persistent gaps in school performance between racial and ethnic groups. The act requires that all public school children perform at their grade level in reading and math by 2014. It requires states to raise the qualifications of new teachers, and to verify the qualifications of existing teachers. In return, the act provides poorer school districts with more money, and gives all states and school districts greater flexibility in how they use federal educational funds.

To make sure schools progress adequately toward their goals, the act sanctions schools that don’t meet yearly benchmarks. Schools that consistently miss these marks risk losing their students, federal money, and, ultimately, control of their institution.

The act worked—at first. In the 2002-03 school year, the largest school systems in the United States—and prime targets for No Child Left Behind—nearly doubled their average rate of improvement in reading and math combined. But a Stanford University study shows that, in 11 of 15 states studied, student achievement test scores leveled off or declined a year later. Researchers in another study found that unless improvement is drastically increased, most schools throughout the nation won’t come even close to the requirement of 100 percent proficiency by 2014.

That’s not necessarily the fault of schools, Waltman says. Many of the factors that go into student performance—learning disabilities, English proficiency, and motivation—are out of the school’s control. “Some students are better at some things. Some students struggle with many things. In order to have a test where all students can be proficient, the bar of excellence has to be set very low,” she says.

Under No Child Left Behind, states decide what their students should learn and when, and some have lowered their expectations, apparently in the hopes of staying compliant with the law. Education Secretary Margaret Spellings recently chastised Utah officials for setting proficiency levels so low in 2003 that  74 percent of white eighth-graders and 47 percent of Hispanics tested “proficient or advanced” in math on the state’s exam, while just 34 percent and seven percent respectively scored at the same level on a national math test.

National attention has focused on other disturbing trends, too. This year, several Hawaii schools were linked to testing irregularities. Last year, Texas officials allowed schools to administer an alternative examination to nine percent of their students, instead of the federally allowed one percent, thereby boosting overall test scores and helping hundreds of Texas schools meet their benchmark.

Waltman is in the middle of a five-year study of changes in instructional practice because of the new accountability rules. She started her study in 2003, gathering baseline data from all Iowa public schools. This year, she collected surveys from teachers and administrators from about 150 schools and will interview instructors during the next school year. Because Iowa is home to Iowa Testing Programs, the company that develops the Iowa Tests of Basic Skills and Iowa Tests of Educational Development, the state has 70 years of K-12 testing data readily available. Waltman will compare those “low stakes” results with new test scores to analyze the effect of teacher accountability on curriculum and testing practices.

It’s too soon for the researcher to make any conclusions, but Waltman has noticed some positive effects of No Child Left Behind. Across all subject areas, teachers are taking more time to help their high school students learn how to read. Schools are more aggressively identifying areas of weakness in curriculum. Teachers in different grade levels are communicating better to fill in gaps and eliminate redundancies in the subjects they teach.

But, historically, holding teachers accountable for students’ test scores has led to a narrowing of subjects taught. Teachers naturally focus on the areas that will be covered by the test. They give more practice tests. They use similar testing formats for in-class evaluations so the students get used to filling in the bubbles. The problem is that standardized tests can’t measure every skill. They can’t measure some facets of the school curriculum at all, including public speaking, physical skills, health, technology, or arts. So, a teacher will focus on testable items like grammar, and that takes time away from the practical application of rules in composition.

Other states have used the Iowa Tests to evaluate their students for decades. In the last couple years, Iowa Testing has started developing other achievement tests to help states comply with No Child Left Behind. But, some test developers are concerned with the effects it will have on curriculum, because test scores simply can’t provide a description of the whole progress of a school.

And while it makes sense for schools to prioritize and to focus their efforts on those subjects they agree are most important, even within the education field, people disagree about what those priorities should be.

We need children to grow into adults who can read and write, but we also need them to be able to learn new skills. We want schools to establish some values, but not all of one group’s values. Society changes, but societies also need order and stability. How do you boil that all down into a nine-month school year?

“There are lots of expectations for public schools,” says David Bills, a professor in the College of Education’s Social Foundations Program. “What happens is we go too far in one direction, which I think we’re doing now, with the testing and everything, but you lose sight of the other things that are important.”

The question of how to improve our schools is a hot one. Nearly everyone agrees that it’s crucial to educate our children the best we can. “If you look at education either from the point of view of the parent—the deep concern of what’s being done for my child—or if you look at it from the point of view of the country—what are we doing to prepare ourselves for the future—education is really important,” says UI law professor William Buss. “The problem is that there never has been a real consensus—a long- term, across-the-board consensus—on what works.”

So, we keep experimenting, says Buss, a former lecturer on education and assistant to the dean of education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. We try high standards and uniform standards, more teacher latitude and more accountability, standardized tests and individual learning platforms. “Preferences change over time and the pendulum swings from one side to the other,” he says.

The term meritocracy was coined in 1958, but the idea that people’s success should be limited only by their abilities and inclination to work is much older. For 150 years, our public schools have struggled to implement a system that will foster equality in an unequal world. The real goal of all educational reform is to make sure all American children have the opportunity to learn and grow as much as they can. It’s a test of our commitment to our future, of our vision of where we want to go as a nation. So far, it’s proven to be a bigger test than we can handle.