AIR Vice President Goldhaber Testifies Before Senate Committee on Possible Changes to No Child Left Behind Act

Washington, D.C. – American Institutes for Research (AIR) Vice President Dan Goldhaber testified before a U.S. Senate committee considering revisions to the No Child Left Behind Act and cautioned that moving away from annual student testing could make it harder to accurately measure teacher effectiveness.

“It is important to recognize that not all parts need fixing. The annual testing requirement of NCLB made possible a great deal of learning about the importance of the nation’s educators,” Goldhaber told members of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee in prepared remarks.

“I am worried that a change we might see with reauthorization – a move away from a requirement of uniform statewide annual year-over-year testing – would greatly shrink and possibly even eliminate our knowledge of educator effectiveness, its distribution among students, and its responsiveness to different policies and practices. In short, it would greatly limit the information we need to make schools better,” he said.

Goldhaber’s research focuses on human capital policies that influence the composition, distribution, and quality of teachers in the workforce. He is Director of the National Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research at AIR and Director of the Center for Education Data and Research at the University of Washington.

The prepared remarks are available at www.air.org.

About AIR

Established in 1946, with headquarters in Washington, D.C., the American Institutes for Research (AIR) is a nonpartisan, not-for-profit organization that conducts behavioral and social science research and delivers technical assistance both domestically and internationally in the areas of health, education, and workforce productivity. For more information, visit www.air.org.