To the Editor:

Your July 13 article, "School-choice advocates launch awareness campaign," showed how the federal No Child Left Behind law has given Indiana families a number of options to deal with problematic schools. Underperforming students now have access to free tutoring, or they can transfer to a better-performing school.

But this is just one small aspect of the NCLB legislation, which also calls for Indiana to implement by the 2005-06 school year a system that can effectively measure the progress of individual students.

Traditional school-by-school, grade-by-grade testing provides only broad average numbers.

To truly address the problem of underperforming schools and qualify for NCLB funding, Indiana should implement a value-added system that measures an individual student's progress from year to year. A student's score should be comparable to his score the year before.

Instead of simply sending kids to different schools, Indiana needs to address the root of its education problem by enhancing the quality of all its public schools. The place to start is by implementing a value-added testing model.

Lance T. Izumi
Director of Education Studies
Pacific Research Institute
San Francisco