The federal No Child Left Behind Act is a key component of President Bush's domestic agenda. As such, he is pulling out all the stops as the 5-year-old law comes up for renewal. Congress should either salvage the workable parts of NCLB or junk it.

By now it should be painfully obvious that cookie-cutter education reform doesn't work. It makes little sense to hold schools in tiny rural and remote communities to the same standards as inner-city schools in the nation's largest cities. As a measure of accountability, what is achieved by labeling a school as a failure when it missed the mark on one of 40 benchmarks?

What does accountability mean, anyway, when some school districts avail themselves to appeals processes and others do not, presumably because they don't know how to play the game?

At the same time, it is true that NCLB has pressured many schools that have had long histories of poor academic achievement to perform better and to do more to meet the needs of students. While many education leaders decry the heavy hand of NCLB, are they willing to impose accountability measures that reward the very best educators and the most improved academic performances yet impose penalties when schools under-perform? Will they address teachers who are ineffective?

That's the $64,000 question regarding school reform. Would the states, in lieu of federal oversight, be willing to take on teacher unions in imposing accountability measures that are meaningful and have teeth?

If not, perhaps NCLB or a law like it serves a purpose. If Congress elects to keep it, it needs to take a realistic look at the vast differences in the nation's public school systems. Can a single accountability measurement take into account differences in school funding, school readiness or location? Should Piute High School, a small, rural school, be assessed in the same manner as an inner-city school in Detroit? Isn't measuring student progress over time a more logical benchmark than snapshots derived from high-stakes tests?

As much as this page has struggled with the notion of federal oversight of public schools — and in many respects, continues to do so — the bottom line is this: How would the states fill the accountability vacuum if NCLB was to sunset? Until a workable substitute is developed, there may be some rationale for reauthorizing NCLB.