Republicans claim their groundbreaking education reform initiative passed two years ago this week has raised standards, improved teacher accountability and leveled the playing field for minority and low-income students.

But their Democratic challengers maintain that the No Child Left Behind Act remains underfunded, pits state legislators against local education officials and emphasizes penalties.

The act requires each state to measure every public school student’s achievement level in math and reading in grades 3 through 8 and once during grades 10 through 12, according to the U.S. Department of Education Web site. If a school continues to score poorly on the tests, parents can choose to transfer their children to a higher-performing school within the same district.

Democratic presidential candidates are using the two-year anniversary of the law to bring attention to some of the problems educators are having in meeting its requirements.

“The methods in (No Child Left Behind) to measure accountability and promote reform are dangerously flawed,” Democratic presidential hopeful Howard Dean states on his Web site. “It uses standardized tests as the sole measure of learning, forces the use of incomprehensible and invalid statistics to measure annual success, and mandates school and state operations that are estimated to cost local school boards and state education departments a significant amount of money without appropriate aid.”

Educational experts also are split on whether the act has accomplished its aims and what needs to be done to fix its flaws.

“There are serious problems in the legislation, and that was recognized when Congress passed the bill,” said Education Prof. Fred Hess, director of NU’s Center for Urban School Policy. “But while it’s inevitable that this legislation will be amended, I doubt it will go away. There’s a national desire that our schools should do a lot better than they have been doing, particularly for low-income and minority kids.”

Hess said he agrees the law has forced school districts in places like Evanston to be more accountable — especially for their low-income and minority students. Because the legislation calls for a breakdown of scores among racial and economic lines, a school could be put on the academic watch list if only one segment of its population posts failing scores.

Hess said even high-reputation districts are having schools put on the list because of minority populations, which have been ignored.

Budget cuts and the economy have made it difficult for schools on an academic watch list to obtain the resources they need to improve, said Leslie Getzinger, a spokeswoman for the American Federation of Teachers.

But the Department of Education reports that states and school districts are receiving more federal dollars than ever before — $23.7 billion in the 2003-04 academic year.

Hess said some of the act’s problems go beyond funding. The tests being used are formulated so that 50 percent of the test-takers will fall below the median score — in effect setting school districts up for failure no matter how much preparation students receive, he said.

In his weekly radio address last Saturday, Bush refuted that the law sets unreasonable standards.

“The time for excuses has passed,” the president said. “Our reforms call for testing because the worst discrimination is to ignore a school’s failure to teach every child.”