The next wave of school accountability must maintain that level of responsibility for every child, especially as states implement new accountability plans under the Every Student Succeeds Act. ESSA gives states greater authority, an opportunity for state leaders to show their seriousness about the achievement of all students.

As states exercise their new authority, the federal government, watchdogging experts, and policymakers must ensure that states implement their plans with fidelity and support the education leaders who use accountability as a key tool to help all kids achieve. Student progress must be measured. And states must engage educators, parents, and the public to discuss the results.

The two of us spent much of the past year interviewing leading educators about the future of school accountability. They all agreed that accountability allows us to organize and operate schools in ways that put kids first. The themes emerging in  form our list of three priorities to watch as states implement ESSA plans.

(Click through the grid below to read each leader’s take on accountability)

First, parents and educators should be able to understand the data that state accountability systems produce. Each state designed an accountability index with student progress targets. The goal of each index is to capture and measure whether children are on track for what is next — the next grade or postsecondary life, whether college, a career, or the military. Simply put, the indexes ask, “Are our state’s children on track to become successful young adults?”

This sounds reasonable and straightforward in theory, but in practice both the index and the reporting data often become incredibly complex and difficult to decipher. Anyone who created or signed off on a state accountability index must be able to explain what the system measures, why the data points matter, how they are weighted to determine the overall performance of a school or district, and whether all students are included.

This leads to the second priority we are tracking: Are states using testing and accountability index data to drive appropriate supports and consequences for struggling schools?

Information gleaned from state tests and other data points is not an end unto itself — it is an invitation to solve for the obstacles that limit student progress. The last thing that low-achieving campuses need is a continual rehash of the same strategies. As Denver Public Schools Superintendent  explained in our interview, states and districts “can’t just say, ‘Oh, gee, the gaps are there. We’re really unhappy about them.’ The issue is, what are you going to do, or do differently?”

In some places, acting on the data could mean linking educators in low-performing campuses with those in high-performing ones. , former New Mexico education commissioner, explains that New Mexico has pursued this strategy as a way for principals and teachers to share successful strategies.

Acting on the data also could mean giving incentives and supports for the highest-performing  in a district to lead and teach in schools that need intensive support. And it could mean using  to make instructional decisions and get buy-in from educators and the public.

In other places, better supports will mean giving students more personal attention. , founder and CEO of Summit Public Schools, reports that Summit schools use student progress data to form, track, and schedule one-on-one mentoring relationships. Summit has a goal of each child having at least one stable adult relationship, a critical element to its instructional design.

Our third tracking priority is what state education agencies and leaders are communicating about their plan’s implementation and student progress. Are parents, educators, employers, higher education leaders, and others regularly updated on the results — and being asked for feedback? Are state agencies providing the sophisticated support many plans outlined?

For better or worse, the state plans are largely completed. Now the real work begins: implementing, watchdogging, and supporting educators who use accountability as a tool to serve all kids.

This job is difficult and messy. If done correctly, states can give students a greater chance of becoming better readers, writers, and problem solvers. This gives children greater agency in their futures.

At the same time, America will be able to sustain what makes our country distinct and has accelerated the nation’s prosperity: educated citizens who provide for themselves and their families, create new ideas and opportunities, and engage in their communities. A society that meaningfully invests in all its youth will steadily strengthen over time, both morally and structurally.

Anne Wicks is director of education reform at the George W. Bush Institute. William McKenzie is editorial director at the George W. Bush Institute.

I still hear lots of comments that the law failed. An equal number of parents and educators tell me that it brought about a focus and high aspirations that had never been in place. Like any piece of legislation, the truth sits somewhere in the middle.

From a systems perspective, NCLB brought about significant policy changes that remain in place. The annual assessments that have been decried for years are still there. Breaking apart testing data by race, income, and special education status is still required. And states still must have accountability systems to move all students toward grade-level performance in math and reading, even if the requirements of those accountability systems have changed.

One of the most important breakthroughs is the commonplace expectation that we will have regular disaggregated data. It seems hard to envision that we’ll ever go back to aggregating data and focusing solely on the performance of the whole school.

We’ve also come a long way with every state having standards and criterion-referenced assessments in place. It’s almost hard to believe that states were often using norm-referenced tests prior to NCLB and were hoping to keep those in place, instead of using assessments aligned to state standards. Now, criterion-referenced assessments are the norm in every state and go beyond just grade-span tests.

The ultimate aim of having more kids reading and doing math proficiently, especially low-income and minority children, started to move in the right direction, too. In 2000, 35 percent of black students scored at basic levels in reading on the National Assessment of Educational Progress test; by 2009, that figure had increased to 48 percent, and today it stands at 52 percent. Similar improvements were seen for Hispanic students, special education students, and low-income students, and gains were generally even higher in math. Those are no small feats.

But we have also fallen short in many ways. For example, state standards and assessments still have room for improvement. While most states have increased their academic proficiency standards, states like my current home state of Texas are moving in the wrong direction.

Texas’s standards are low, and the state continues to play games by setting low expectations for how many questions a student has to get right on the state assessment. Performance appears to be getting better, but in actuality the bar is just being lowered.

Nationally, while student achievement started to move in the right direction in the 2000s, we have seen either flattening achievement or, in some cases, declines since that time. The most recent results from the Program for International Student Assessment administered in 2015 show that the U.S. has fallen 17 points in math and six points in science from 2009 to 2015. The percentage of eighth-graders scoring at or above basic in reading on the NAEP has been stagnant, and we have seen declines in math in the most recent results from 2015.

Despite that bad news, we get a lot of yawns in reaction to the data and a sense of complacency has set in. Flat or declining achievement used to get the attention of policymakers and the public. Now there’s not much of a reaction and not much of a sense of urgency in changing the status quo.

That complacency is also still alive and well in what President George W. Bush called “the soft bigotry of low expectations.” A recent study by Seth Gershenson of American University and Nicholas Papageorge of Johns Hopkins University followed students who were in 10th grade in 2002 through to 2012. They found that white teachers on average had significantly lower expectations for black students than they did for white students.

The study also showed that those lower expectations impact achievement; having teachers who were confident that their students would complete college made a real difference in their college attainment. Setting high expectations for students cannot solely be done through legislative action, but No Child Left Behind certainly had that aspiration, whether people liked it or not.

It mattered that we had a president and leaders in Congress talking about and fighting against that soft bigotry of low expectations. We can’t prove causality, but seeing increases in student achievement for minority students after passage of the law seems likely to have some correlation.

We’ve come a long way, but have a long way to go. That kind of national leadership and sense of urgency are needed now more than ever.

Holly Kuzmich is executive director of the George W. Bush Institute.

School accountability. In some circles, the term has become a dirty word. But here are 10 reasons that the fundamentals of accountability — raising academic standards, testing students regularly to see if they grasp them, and assigning some consequence to the results — still matter.

These points come from education leaders who participated in interviews this year for The ‘A’ Word: Accountability — The Dirty Word of Today’s School Reform.

Why Accountability Matters

1. The fundamental responsibility of schools is to kids, and you can’t help kids and schools improve if you can’t diagnose a problem.

— Margaret Spellings, president of the University of North Carolina and former education secretary for President George W. Bush

2. Before accountability, schools could hide low-achieving students, especially poor and minority kids.

— John King, president and CEO of the Education Trust and former education secretary for President Barack Obama

3. Without accountability systems identifying a problem, states and districts don’t have to get low-performing schools adequate resources.

— Spellings

4. Accountability is about helping schools meet goals – and getting support to meet those goals.

— Tom Boasberg, superintendent of Denver Public Schools

5. Accountability can lead to the restoration or replacement of a school that is not serving its students well over time and shows no signs of improving with the right supports.

— Boasberg

6. Accountability is a way to drive results for kids who have no voice, especially for students with learning disabilities or whose native language is not English.

— Diane Tavenner, founder and CEO of Summit Public Schools

7. Students and their families need to know if they are receiving a good education that will put them on the path to the middle class.

— Hanna Skandera, former New Mexico secretary of education

8. Accountability leads to quality educators being rewarded and low-level teachers leaving the system.

— Kevin Huffman, former Tennessee education commissioner

9. Accountability keeps a spotlight on rural districts that are often overshadowed by urban districts.

— Felicia Cumings Smith, assistant superintendent of academic services at Jefferson County Public Schools in Kentucky

10. Who wants to be on a team where no one is accountable?

— Boasberg

William McKenzie is editorial director at the George W. Bush Institute.

She got off to a tough start. While anti-establishment, anti-elites demagoguery pulled her through the Republican primaries, reality bit back in the general election. O’Donnell had and a range of other  — including  in which she claimed to have “dabbled in witchcraft.”

Desperate, O’Donnell launched an ad. “I’m not a witch,” . “I’m nothing you’ve heard.”

The ad — spoiler alert — lift the curse on O’Donnell’s campaign, but her protests against her public labeling became an instant legend. In the world of politics, nothing is more difficult than unraveling an established narrative.

Which — no, really — brings us to No Child Left Behind (NCLB). Beloved at its inception, confused in its implementation, the law was almost universally dismissed when it was replaced by the Every Student Succeeds Act in late 2015. If we could wave a wand and cast a spell that would raise it back to life, NCLB might well be spluttering just like O’Donnell.

“I’m not a draconian federal intrusion into American schools. I’m not the destruction of public education,” it would say. “I’m nothing you’ve heard.”

How did this happen? Well, in the two or three decades before NCLB, the federal government tried a variety of mostly voluntary ways of getting states to set — and raise — their expectations for schools. Some did. Most didn’t. To a degree, NCLB represents a certain national exasperation with the pace of progress under state-driven education reform.

That’s why No Child Left Behind expanded the federal government’s involvement in state and local educational decisions. It significantly increased the pressure on states to define what they believed students should know and be able to do in each grade. It required states and districts to use assessments to track how students were doing at meeting those expectations. It increased transparency in public education by requiring the collection and publication of more data on student achievement. In particular, it made states break out student achievement data by different student groups — English learners, students of different races, etc — that made it much easier to see achievement gaps.

The law’s approach wasn’t perfect — it was probably too blunt in a number of places. But neither was it some impossibly foreign idea in education policy. After years of , begging, and states to set basic academic standards and whether kids were meeting them, federal policymakers decided to just make states do it.

But at every stage of the way, states monkeyed around with the supposed mandates. NCLB required them to set some academic standards, but it didn’t really specify how rigorous those had to be. Predictably, .

NCLB also required states to administer some consequences for schools where kids were routinely falling short of those (again, disparate) academic expectations. It even included a list of options, and they sounded fierce. Persistently struggling schools (those missing targets for five consecutive years) were required to do things like fire all the staff, submit to a takeover by the state, convert into a public charter school, or contract out to a private schools operator.

And yet, the law also permitted such schools to try “other major restructuring.” suggested that did not have the appetite for NCLB’s dramatic options; most opted instead for other less comprehensive, less disruptive, and less impactful strategies.

Put another way, No Child Left Behind pulled its punches, even if its critics never did. It sounded rough, it sounded tough, but it gave states ample room to shield their schools’ performance from most of its strongest provisions. Then, after this partial and inconsistent application led to , opponents could focus on all the law’s tedious, unpopular, (usually) inflexible requirements.

That’s no way to evaluate a policy. Or, to carry the conceit a bit too far — . It is, however, a perfectly effective way of undermining an idea’s public standing — in preparation for its dismissal.

“I’m nothing you’ve heard,” insists the law. “I’m not too overbearing — if anything, I’m too weak.”

And yet, the Every Student Succeeds Act gives states far more room to set their own definitions of educational success and equity. Do they have the capacity — and the political will — to do this well? To do this fairly? In the best-case scenario, the infrastructure of standards, assessments, and institutional expectations that NCLB built will maintain some level of transparency and accountability for low-performing schools. In the likely-case scenario, however, that obscure school performance, generally ignore weak federal legislative text, and generally allow the NCLB era’s reform urgency to dissipate.

So spare a thought today for the boxed-in, those who have been defined out of legitimacy by the political currents. Their detractors wrote them a tragic role in our public narratives, and no amount of magic could bring them back. As for O’Donnell, witch or not, she a difficult figure to in any case, and the stakes weren’t particularly high — especially as far as kids are concerned.

If only we could say the same for federal education law.