With the reauthorization of the No Child Left Behind Act looming on the horizon this year, the Civil Rights Project/Proyecto Derechos Civiles (CRP/PDC) at UCLA’s Graduate School of Education & Information Studies recently completed a collection of essays containing several critiques of the law as well as proscriptions for change.

CRP/PDC K-12 senior researcher Gail L. Sunderman edited the 280-page book, titled Holding NCLB Accountable: Achieving Accountability, Equity, and School Reform, which was published by Corwin Press.

“We not only looked at the problems with No Child Left Behind, but we came up with ways to make it better,” says Sunderman, the project director on a five-year CRP/PDC study examining implementation of the 2002 No Child Left Behind Act and the co-author of NCLB Meets School Realities: Lessons from the Field. “It’s time to reauthorize the bill, so we kind of geared the book toward coming up with research-based ideas of what needs to be addressed and what needs to be done to improve the law.”

The essays were written by several noted education scholars, including Stanford University’s Linda Darling-Hammond; Robert Linn of the University of Colorado; Johns Hopkins University’s Robert Balfanz and Nettie Legters; Boston College’s Walter Haney; Goodwin Liu of the University of California, Berkeley; and Russell Rumberger of the University of California, Santa Barbara. The collection analyzes the law’s accountability and assessment system, the capacities of states to implement the law, and the impact of school reform.

Harvard University’s Daniel Koretz asserts that the accountability system is not research based.

“We know far too little about how to hold schools accountable for improving student performance,” says the testing expert.

Jaekyung Lee, an associate professor of education at the State University of New York at Buffalo, compared the nation’s report card – the results of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) – to state assessment results. He found that, since the implementation of the law in 2001, federal accountability measures have not improved educational levels and narrowed achievement disparities.