No Child Left Behind has turned a great deal of attention onto whether our schools are meeting the standards set out for them in each of the 50 states. Not as much attention, however, has been paid on an equally important topic: what do we do with the schools that are identified as being most in need of help?

Indeed, as we here at Our Education travel and speak with wide audiences of high school students about their schools, few object to the idea that they and their schools should be expected to show proficiency in core subject areas. And though some students do object to the use of standardized tests as the sole instrument for demonstrating this proficiency, many more raise concerns about the next logical question: how can we best help those schools that are found to be failing?

This Education Week article digs deeper into this question and the recent debate over which corrective measures are most appropriate in the federal law to help push failing schools to begin meeting annual yearly progress (AYP) benchmarks. Broadly speaking, the two kinds of incentives that can be offered each have weaknesses. On the one hand, punishing the failing schools with punitive policies and removing resources may only do a disservice to the children being taught in these schools since many of them may require greater investments of time and resources, not less. On the other hand, providing additional resources to schools that fail to meet proficiency targets may create a peverse set of incentives whereby schools choose intentionally to fail since doing so would result in a windfall of support.

Currently, NCLB requires schools who fail to meet AYP targets in two consecutive years to allow students to attend neighboring public schools which are meeting their benchmarks. However, this has happened much less in reality than is actually provided for by the law. If a school fails to meet AYP for 3 years, the district must provided tutoring services to students to help them succeed. And if a school fails for 4 or 5 straight years, the school is eligible for "staff restructuring", which is supposed to include completely shutting down and re-opening a school with new faculty.

But proponent and opponents of the law both agree that more attention needs to be paid to how we go about fixing our failing schools than NCLB's lockstep set of interventions. Members of the Bush administration have suggested creating a voucher program to allow students who attend the five-year failing schools to attend private schools, but there has been significant opposition to this idea in the Congress. Others have responded that a better solution would be to strengthen the public school choice provisions of the law. Still other measures being suggested for when NCLB is re-authorized include a provision to allow districts with failing schools to authorize the creation of charter schools even if city or state caps on charters would prohibit it, and also proposals to allow school districts to nullify certain portions of collective bargaining contracts with teachers to make big changes such as increasing the length of the school day.

At best it seems that each of these ideas has partial support among legislators and education experts. However, as the old adage goes, knowing that you have a problem is half of the solution. Five years ago it wasn't clear in any systematic, objective way which schools were serving children well and which schools were not. Today there is some consensus on it. What remains is for elected officials and educators is to come up with a plan for how to fix what is broken.