Last week I heard a man’s commentary on No Child Left Behind on NPR. I wish I had written down his name, but I was driving home from school and didn’t think it would be very safe to scramble for a pen and paper from behind the wheel. The man was responding to the current decision by Congress to renew NCLB and the consensus that the law is here to stay.

As I understood it, his main point was that teachers and people in education need to “get over it” because the law illuminates problem areas. Very true. He argued that raising the standards bar is a good thing. I agreed. Finally, he proposed that any teacher who has a problem with NCLB should probably re-examine his or her priorities. I’m not sure he fully understands the law or its complicated relationship with education and education reform.

While I support the implementation of state standards to be taught in curricula and limited standardized testing as a means of accountability for teachers and students, there are many reasons why this data alone cannot and will never reform education. For one, numbers are vacuous when divorced from their context, and all schools have vastly different contexts, cultures, and populations.

In order to measure the quality of a school, one must examine the school culture through systematic, qualitative research and analysis.Such research and analysis of schools ought to examine school culture (from the perceptions of faculty, staff, students, and parents), student growth and learning, student achievement, the creativity of student work, the depth of student understanding, the development of student character, cooperation among faculty, staff, students and parents, general morale, and the ambition of the school’s faculty.

The complex interplay of these factors is ignored when we examine only the raw data of a school’s achievement. If that data were, however, to be put in a particular context, I believe the quality of a school could be better measured, and the necessary steps to empower a school to educate its students could be more clearly and accurately determined. Threatening administrators, teachers, and students with a fear of failure is not enough to improve education. We must go further if we truly want to make a change, instead of just creating the illusion on paper of attempting reform.