Much will be made of yesterday's report on the increase in reading and math scores for elementary and middle school students across the nation. We in Urbana actually took part in last years NAEP exam, and these results do in fact reflect the progress our own students have made.

The crucial question will of course be whether or not the President's NCLB legislation is to be credited with these increases. As I have said before, NCLB is not all bad and actually has some merit in it's emphasis on the achievement gap between minority and white students. The test results seem to indicate that this emphasis is making a difference. Intimidation apparently works better than we thought.

While critics of the teacher unions have bemoaned the woeful job our teachers have been doing over the last thirty years, our nation's educators have been quietly working their asses off. The long term trend of test scores has been rising for those thirty years, even though teachers are increasingly called upon to solve societies problems (for $35K a year), and are often blamed for the failure of their students (regardless of family life, socio-economic status, etc.).

In Urbana we have focused incredibly hard on identifying our struggling learners and creating new opportunities for them to learn. My colleagues and I have spent countless hours rethinking how we teach, redesigning curriculum, and adapting new strategies for instruction. It seems that, eventually, our work will pay off.

But will we be recognized? Let me be clear, the students are the folks who deserve the praise here. NCLB didn't raise those scores through intimidation, our students raised those scores through hard work.

But the teachers had a lot to do with it. Perhaps it is time to recognize not only the difficulty of the problems public education faces, but also the amount of success that our nation's teachers create on a daily basis. NCLB may have laid the foundation for improvement by imposing intimidating mandates on our nation's schools. But it is the students, and their teachers, who have done the hard work to improve our schools.