Currently, the law requires states to set achievement standards on basic-skills tests for grades three through eight, and hold schools accountable for reaching them. In the three years since the No Child Left Behind Act became law, public school officials have not been shy about vilifying it and denouncing its effects. It's no wonder. After decades of cruising along with no accountability for their job performance, many school officials have come to feel that they are professionally entitled to run our schools however they want, regardless of whether kids are actually learning.

The empirical research on this question consistently shows that accountability exams in high schools don't increase the dropout rate. Dropouts tend to be academically low-performing students, so the children who can't pass the test are mostly the same ones who would have dropped out anyway. And accountability standards force schools to work harder at teaching basic skills, causing some students who would otherwise have dropped out to stay in school because now they're actually learning something.

To see whether this is the case, I recently performed a nationwide study comparing the results schools got on accountability tests with the same schools' results on widely respected tests that aren't used for accountability purposes. These other tests are nationally recognized as genuine measurements of student learning, but they aren't used for accountability purposes. I found that schools' results on the two types of tests were highly correlated, indicating that accountability tests do measure real learning and are not distorted by test manipulation.