In spirit, No Child Left Behind, was always a good idea. It was an imperative from Washington that, rich or poor, our nation would strive to ensure that every child gets a proper education and not be left to fall through the many cracks in our educational system.

No Child Left Behind was President George W. Bush’s first major legislative accomplishment and it garnered strong support from both political parties. (Remember when that occasionally happened?)

But a decade after its passage, it appears that while No Child Left Behind has had some positive impact, it hasn’t done all it intended and has even had some negative consequences. Among them — school districts and states subtly or not-so-subtly lowering standards to make sure No Child Left Behind benchmarks are met and teachers rigidly “teaching to the test” to the exclusion of other important lessons.

No Child Left Behind needs some changes. It needs to be a vehicle for raising the bar for those kids and those schools that perpetually struggle and not a mechanism that, unintended or not, exacerbates problems and leaves those educators who truly are doing their best in tough circumstances throwing up their hands in disgust.

The U.S. Department of Education is working on making the law less burdensome for states that are trying to overhaul their school systems and improve student performance, Education Secretary Arne Duncan said Monday at a press conference. Next month, federal education officials plan to issue rules to states that want a waiver from some of No Child Left Behind’s most punitive provisions, Duncan said.

At least 13 states have contacted the Obama administration about getting a waiver or have announced plans to seek a waiver. New Jersey, which has many chronically failing schools in its former Abbott districts scattered around the state, is “actively considering” requesting an exemption, the state’s acting education commissioner, Chris Cerf, said in a statement.

By seeking a waiver, what we don’t want to see, and what parents whose kids are stuck in forever failing schools shouldn’t want to see, is a retreat from demanding more of schools stuck in the mud. Those schools aren’t hard to identify. In New Jersey, many of them are the Abbotts — the places where we pump a lot of state tax dollars only to see consistently low scores, low grades and high dropouts rates.

Changes to No Child Left Behind should reasonably balance the use of the carrot and the stick while making sure that kids across states are judged the same way on their mastery of the same basic skills. Here are some things that ought to be revised:

Ease the reliance on testing.

Across the nation, kids in every grade from 3 to 8 are given standardized multiple choice tests every year for math and reading skills. With federal funding for districts riding on the results of these tests, there’s far too much emphasis on tests in many schools. In some place, there’s also widespread cheating, often not by students but by educators, to make the grade.

Figure out why reading performance hasn’t improved at the same rate as math scores.

A comprehensive study released in November 2009 by researchers Thomas Dee and Brian Jacob of the University of Virginia found that student improvement under No Child Left Behind has been concentrated in the earlier grades, most notably in Grade 4 math scores and mostly among Hispanic and low-income students.

Where No Child Left Behind hasn’t resulted among specific groups or in specific subjects, clearly either the instruction hasn’t improved or the assessment isn’t being done correctly.

Require more uniform testing and measurement from state to state.

Yes, we’re arguing to allow for less teaching to the test. But that doesn’t mean we want to see all standardized testing go away — not at all. If we’re going to have national standards for basic skills kids should possess by certain ages, there needs to be uniform testing standards. What good is it to punish so-called “failing” districts in one state while rewarding “successful” districts in other states where the bar is being set too low.

No Child Left Behind has always attempted to address this. But states still have their own assessments of kids and those assessments differ, sometimes greatly, from state to state in form and content.

We shouldn’t scrap the concept of demanding greater accountability for student performance in our schools. The United States, after all, still ranks far below where it should when its students’ skills are compared with kids being educated in other industrialized nations — particularly in math and science.

But a decade in, there’s evidence that shows where No Child Left Behind is ready for improvement.

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