No Child Left Behind has created in the last six months more anxiety than a decade’s worth of senior proms. Some of the anxiety over the federal education policy act is justified as the new standards and accountability measures have proved cumbersome or in some way unrealistic. Other gripes are the inevitable response to anything new. What the overseers of this act – the U.S. Department of Education, Congress – need is a way of determining which is which.

Sen. Susan Collins, who was a leader in seeing that No Child Left Behind became law, has proposed, with North Dakota Sen. Kent Conrad, one way of sorting this out, particularly as the act affects rural schools. This issue has been raised in Maine because of a limited number of resources for rural schools to respond to shortcomings under NCLB – whether subgroup data for meeting standards are accurate if they are collected over multiple years, for instance, and whether those schools have sufficient supplemental services.

These concerns are shared widely in rural districts in Maine, according to officials at the state education department, but they are not limited to this state. Nationally, nearly one-third of all students attend schools in towns with populations below 25,000. Some of the questions the two senators would like the Government Accounting Office to investigate are whether NCLB creates compliance costs unique to rural school districts and whether it creates uncompensated costs to these districts. Does NCLB affect the ability of rural school districts to retain and hire teachers in rural communities and how is the federal Department of Education helping rural districts meet NCLB requirements?

These are valuable questions, in part because they do not begin with the assumption that NCLB is fatally flawed but rather look for specific ways it may need to be improved. And the questions would be even more useful in a larger GAO investigation because medium and large districts have some of the same concerns. NCLB is a huge overhaul of federal education policy; it deserves regular, third-party assessments of its strengths and weaknesses and responses from Congress based on those findings. Certainly, NCLB will be assessed every bit as thoroughly as the districts that fall under its new rules, but Congress should have its own independent means for monitoring progress and addressing specific concerns.

If NCLB is going to help students, it will be modified as new information emerges about its effects, both positive and negative. This is not the same as providing “flexibility,” which the Bush administration says NCLB includes to help states choose the best path for school districts. Some of the apparent problems with NCLB – the levels of bookkeeping, the amount of testing over instruction time and the assumption of available resources – couldn’t be met with flexibility but with amendments to the act. Understanding how NCLB or any reform of such size works is crucial, and Sens. Collins and Conrad have begun to ask the right questions.