The House Education Committee recently began hearings on reauthorizing the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act, President Bush’s signature education reform law. Debate has thus far centered on closing the “achievement gap” between low- and high-income students, with liberal groups such as the Center for American Progress and the Citizens’ Commission on Civil Rights objecting to a proposal that would allow individual school districts to set proficiency standards. The critics argue that districts would lower their standards. But NCLB already encourages states to game the system and avoid accountability.

The law requires every child in grades 3 through 8 to be tested in math and reading every year. It stipulates that 100 percent of pupils must qualify as “proficient” on state-administered exams by the 2013-14 academic year. School districts are supposed to set up a schedule to meet this requirement, which is commonly known as Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP).

NCLB has given states a perverse incentive to lower their standards to keep the federal money coming in. Such sliding standards have a detrimental effect on all pupils, including the brightest.

But holding schools accountable to the AYP schedule has some bad effects. Most importantly, it encourages teachers and schools to focus heavily on “bubble” children currently near the proficiency level. Derek Neal, a University of Chicago economist who recently released a study of NCLB, found that schoolteachers are pressured to increase their proficiency numbers, while kids outside the bubble, particularly high achievers, are slighted.

NCLB demands “proficiency.” But in trying to minimize federal oversight, the law also allows each state to set its own definition. As Harvard education expert Paul E. Peterson and American Enterprise Institute scholar Frederick M. Hess point out, this has led to the “bizarre situation in which some states achieve handsome proficiency results by grading their students against low standards, while other states suffer poor proficiency ratings only because they have high standards.”

The Peterson-Hess study, “Johnny Can Read … in Some States,” finds that states have a perverse incentive to lower their standards in order to keep the federal money coming in. Such sliding standards have a detrimental effect on all pupils, including the brightest. We mistakenly assume that the smart kids will “just figure it out” on their own. Not so. The United States is still a leader in innovation, creativity, and entrepreneurship, says the Department of Education, “but other nations and their students are catching up fast, especially in the future-friendly fields of mathematics and science.”

According to the most recent Program for International Student Assessment test, American 15-year-olds ranked 24th out of 29 developed nations in math. Perhaps more troubling, a separate international math and science test found that only 7 percent of America’s 4th- and 8th-graders reached the level of “advanced.” By comparison, 38 percent of Singapore’s 4th-graders and 44 percent of its 8th-graders were at this stage.

To remain competitive, the United States must engage and challenge its most advanced pupils.

At the NCLB hearings, a witness from the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation spoke of its new study, “Achievement Trap,” which highlights the failure of public schools to address the needs of high-achieving students from lower-income backgrounds. Referring to such students, the study notes that “educators, policymakers, and the public assume they can fend for themselves when the facts show otherwise.”

To remain competitive, the United States must engage and challenge its most advanced pupils. That’s why groups like the Davidson Institute for Talent Development are focusing on their needs. (Davidson has even opened a special school for talented students in Nevada.) Some states—including Georgia, Iowa, and Oklahoma—have a history of investing in gifted education. But others, such as New York and Illinois, provide fewer options for top students.

This gets back to the problem with NCLB. Does it make sense to gauge a school’s success by testing to see that every child meets the same proficiency standard? Parents know their children have different proficiencies. The only way for every child to meet a common standard is for the test to be geared to the most academically challenged. Is that really how we want to measure educational achievement?

As they craft and tweak our education policies, school reformers must ask themselves whether the effort to achieve 100 percent “proficiency” risks an acceptance of mediocrity. It certainly does not help America’s brightest students.

Phil Brand is the director of EducationWatch at the Capital Research Center (CRC). James Dellinger is the director of CRC’s StateWatch.

Image by Shutterstock.