John Kerry recently told the Des Moines Register: “You have to have accountability. You have to have measurements. You have to have standards. I wanted all those things.” That’s tough talk. However, much of Kerry’s education agenda would undercut the very accountability, measurements, and standards he purports to support.

Under the federal No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), signed in 2002 by President Bush, testing is the key to accountability. States must test students in basic subjects and students must demonstrate adequate yearly progress on these tests, which should be aligned with state academic content standards.

If schools fail to raise performance, they are subject to sanctions, including student transfers to better performing schools. NCLB’s goal is to have every child proficient in English and math, as measured by the state tests, by 2014.

Although he voted for NCLB, Kerry now says that he has problems with the testing portion of the law. He says that President Bush has implemented the law in a way “where you have this one-size-fits-all testing, which doesn’t adequately reflect how education works and how you measure kids.” Sadly, Kerry fails to understand the importance and positive impact of testing.

Testing has been shown to improve the achievement of students, including those traditionally viewed as difficult to educate. Studies of high-performing schools with large numbers of low-income students have noted their frequent testing and the use of state test results as diagnostic tools to discover and correct student and teacher weaknesses.

Further, recent research by the University of Minnesota has found that the large-scale testing promoted by NCLB has been highly effective in improving results among those with some of the greatest challenges – disabled students. Results have included higher expectations for disabled students, improved teacher instruction, reduced dropout rates, and raised student performance.

Testing also gives policymakers and the public an objective tool to hold schools accountable for their performance. While not perfect, standardized testing is a more accurate gauge of student achievement than most alternatives. Yet, Kerry wants to add less rigorous criteria such as attendance and parental satisfaction to the way schools are judged.

Unfortunately, a school could have perfect attendance but poor student performance in its classrooms. Parents can also be “satisfied” with a school for many non-academic reasons.

Kerry education advisor Robert Gordon says that rather than relying solely on testing, evaluating individual portfolios of student class work “is a serious approach that ought to be given much more careful consideration.” However, a RAND study of Vermont’s portfolio assessment system found inconsistent and unreliable scoring of student portfolios, difficulty in training scorers, a wide variation in the type of work required in different schools, and an astronomic price tag.

Why is Kerry so intent on diminishing the role of testing? It’s no coincidence that the National Education Association (NEA), the nation’s largest teachers union and one of Kerry’s biggest backers, wants to reduce the importance of testing by focusing on criteria such as – surprise, surprise – absenteeism, parental involvement, and student work portfolios.

Of course, the reason the NEA and Kerry want to add fuzzy accountability criteria to the way schools are judged is to obscure the test-based performance of students. This makes it easier for teacher union members to escape responsibility for the poor performance of their students.

De-emphasizing testing will not improve NCLB or school accountability. What would help states would be the adoption of a value-added assessment model that would calculate an annual individual student growth target, based on a student’s previous state test scores. A student would have to hit annual targets in order to stay on track to reach subject-matter proficiency by the 2014 NCLB deadline. By calculating individual growth targets, teachers will know just how much they need to improve the performance of each student and can identify those in need of remedial help and greater attention.

By seeking to weaken the role of testing, John Kerry would undermine the nation’s hard-fought progress on school accountability. The real losers will be students in schools that receive the Kerry seal of approval but fail to educate adequately our future generations.