George Will examines the success of the No Child Left Behind Act’s underlying conservatism, which manifests itself in a pedagogical paradigm shift away from blind spending and toward school accountability:

Federal money – the 8 percent [of total spending on grades K through 12] lever – is large enough to change what must be changed before anything else can be: the subject. Answering the question “Is Bush a Conservative?” in Commentary, Daniel Casse of the White House Writers Group notes that a major theme of Bush’s governance is “deconstructing domestic-policy monopolies (Medicare, Social Security, teachers unions, etc.).” And NCLB, although flawed, “has succeeded in changing the terms of debate.”

“For years,” he writes, “‘progress’ in education was measured by the expenditure of ever more federal dollars and the appeasement of Washington-based pressure groups.” Today the argument is about standards – how to measure and meet them – and how much autonomy schools should have in doing so.

That is progress that will not be easily reversed, partly because it is popular with a constituency, the inner city poor, that Democrats often abuse in order to mollify a rival constituency, the teachers unions.

An aide to John Kerry says, “He wouldn’t in any way back away from the commitment to accountability.”

(well, Kerry is committed to “accountability” in every case except where live microphones and his own big mouth are involved. Those instances he blames on the Republicans, whose evil attack machine somehow infiltrated his brain and hijacked his otherwise sober judgment. But I digress…)

It took decades to defeat liberal resistance to welfare reform. Resistance to education reform is crumbling more quickly.

Let’s hope so.

As a teacher myself, I understand the resistance among some educators to standardized testing — the fear being that “teaching to the test” will actually dilute what would otherwise be a broader education. But I find this argument unpersuasive, if only because I’ve seen first hand the increasingly poor basic skills levels of students arriving at college.

School accountability in its present incarnation may not be the answer, ultimately (I suspect the problem lies deeper — somewhere within mainstream pedagogical philosophy, most likely), but it’s a start. And the accountability movement is certainly one structural step toward identifying and correcting the problem.