Most programs of federal aid to K-12 education are authorized by the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA). The ESEA was most recently amended and reauthorized by the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB, P.L. 107 - 110 ). The authorization for ESEA programs expired at the end of FY2008, although ESEA programs continue to operate as long as appropriations are provided, and the 111 th Congress is expected to consider whether to amend and extend the ESEA. Debates over reauthorization of the ESEA have thus far focused on the following overarching issues: (1) What has been the impact of the substantial expansion of standards-based assessments of pupil achievement required under the ESEA, and should these requirements be expanded further to include additional subjects or grade levels? (2) Are adequate yearly progress (AYP) requirements appropriately focused on improving education for disadvantaged pupil groups and identifying low-performing schools? (3) Have the program improvement, corrective actions, and restructuring required under the ESEA for schools and local educational agencies (LEAs) that fail to meet AYP standards for two consecutive years or more been effectively implemented, and have they significantly improved achievement levels among pupils in the affected schools? (4) What has been the impact of the requirements that all public school teachers (and many paraprofessionals) be highly qualified and that well-qualified teachers be equitably distributed across schools and LEAs? (5) Should ESEA programs be funded at levels closer to the maximum authorized amounts, and at what levels, if any, should authorizations be set for future years? (6) Should the ESEA place greater emphasis on enhancing the nation's international competitiveness in science, mathematics, and foreign language achievement? (7) The NCLB, with its numerous new or substantially expanded requirements for participating states and LEAs, initiated a major increase in federal involvement in basic aspects of public K-12 education. Should the active federal role in K-12 education embodied in the NCLB be maintained? Each of these issues is discussed in turn below. These discussions are brief, and are intended primarily as an introduction to other CRS reports (referenced below) that provide much more detailed discussions and analyses of these broad issues. What has been the impact of the substantial expansion of standards-based assessments of pupil achievement required under the ESEA, and should these requirements be expanded further to include additional subjects and/or grade levels (especially for senior high school pupils)? The current generation of pupil assessment requirements under ESEA Title I-A began with the Improving America's Schools Act (IASA) of 1994 ( P.L. 103 - 382 ), that required participating states to develop or adopt curriculum content standards, pupil performance standards, and assessments linked to these, at least in the subjects of mathematics and reading/English language arts, and for at least one grade in each of three grade ranges (grades 3-5, 6-9, and 10-12). The NCLB substantially expanded these requirements to provide that all participating states are to implement assessments, linked to state content and academic achievement standards, for all public school pupils in each of grades 3-8 in reading and mathematics by the end of the 2005-2006 school year. Participating states were also required to develop and implement assessments at three grade levels in science by the 2007-2008 school year. Assessment results must be provided to LEAs, schools, and teachers before the beginning of the subsequent school year, so that they might be available in a timely manner to make adequate yearly progress determinations for schools and LEAs (see the following section of this report). The primary rationale for requiring annual administration of standards-based tests in each of grades 3-8 is that the provision of timely information on the performance of pupils, schools, and LEAs throughout most of the elementary and middle school grades is of value for both diagnostic and accountability purposes. Arguably, such assessment results will improve the quality of the AYP determinations that are based primarily on the assessments, and help determine whether Title I-A is meeting its primary goals, such as reducing achievement gaps between disadvantaged and other pupils. Achievement standards associated with the required assessments must establish at least three performance levels for all pupils—advanced, proficient, and basic (or partially proficient). State educational agencies (SEAs) must provide evidence from a test publisher or other relevant source that their assessments are of adequate technical quality for the purposes required under Title I-A. The ESEA authorizes (in Title VI-A-1) annual grants to the states to help pay the costs of meeting the Title I-A standard and assessment requirements. States and LEAs participating in Title I-A must report assessment results and certain other data to parents and the public through "report cards." States are to publish report cards for the state overall, and LEAs are to publish report cards for the LEA overall and for individual schools. The report cards must generally include information on pupils' academic performance disaggregated by race, ethnicity, and gender, as well as disability, migrant, English proficiency, and economic disadvantage status. In addition to these state assessment requirements, the NCLB requires all states participating in Title I-A to participate in National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) tests in 4 th and 8 th grade reading and mathematics, which are administered every two years. Before enactment of the NCLB, participation in NAEP was voluntary for states. NAEP is administered by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), with oversight and several aspects of policy established by the National Assessment Governing Board (NAGB). The main NAEP assessment reports pupil scores in relation to performance levels based on determinations by NAGB of what pupils should know and be able to do at basic, proficient, and advanced levels with respect to challenging subject matter. NAEP tests are administered to only a representative sample of pupils enrolled in public and private K-12 schools, and the tests are designed so that no pupil takes an entire NAEP test. While NAEP cannot currently provide assessment results for individual pupils, schools, or most LEAs, NAEP conducts assessments in 4 th and 8 th grade mathematics, reading, and science at the state level as well as for selected major cities. Under state NAEP, the sample of pupils tested is increased in order to provide reliable estimates of achievement scores for pupils in each participating state. An implicit purpose of this requirement is to confirm trends in pupil achievement, as measured by state-selected assessments, although such confirmation is limited and indirect, usually limited to comparisons of the percentage of pupils at various achievement levels on NAEP and state tests. Issues regarding the expanded ESEA Title I-A pupil assessment requirements include the following: When will states implement math and reading assessments in each of grades 3-8? What will be the consequences for states that did not meet the deadline of the end of the 2005-2006 school year? Most states did not meet this deadline. As of January 2009, the assessment programs of 39 states have been fully approved. In recent years, a number of states have experienced the loss of a portion of their Title I-A state administration grants for failure to implement required assessments on schedule. Should requirements for standards-based assessments in states participating in ESEA Title I-A be expanded for senior high school students? As discussed above, the current assessment requirements are focused primarily, although not solely, on the elementary and middle school grades. Proposals have been offered to expand required assessments for pupils in grades 10-12 , including required state participation in a 12 th grade NAEP assessment, in part to strengthen the process of determining adequate yearly progress for senior high schools. However, the substantial variation in senior high school instructional programs raises many issues, including the following: Might the required assessments include high school exit or graduation tests? Given the relatively high degree of curriculum differentiation at the senior high school level (e.g., career and technical education programs, college preparation programs, and so forth) might states be allowed to meet these requirements by adopting different types of tests for pupils in different types of academic programs? Is it appropriate to allow states to meet current or future high school assessment requirements through end-of-course tests that are different for students taking different courses? Might Advanced Placement or International Baccalaureate tests be used to meet the new assessment requirements for pupils participating in those programs? Has the emphasis on reading and mathematics in the Title I-A assessment and adequate yearly progress requirements (see below) begun to "crowd out" the amount of time and attention devoted to other subjects, such as writing, science, history, civics, or foreign languages? Concern has been expressed by some, and there is some evidence, that the emphasis placed on reading and mathematics (and, to a much more limited degree, science) through the Title I-A assessment and adequate yearly progress requirements has reduced time and energy devoted to other subject areas for many students. This might lead to proposals to either de-emphasize the current requirements, or to expand the assessment requirements to include more subjects in more grades. Should "national standards" of pupil performance be incorporated in some fashion into the assessment process, as a way of addressing substantial differences in state performance standards? Curriculum content and pupil performance standards are determined at the discretion of the states, and there appear to be very substantial differences in the degree of challenge embodied particularly in the pupil performance standards. Some have called for a more explicit role for "national standards," either as embodied in NAEP or in some other fashion, in the NCLB outcome accountability process, to more directly address national concerns about educational quality, and establish greater consistency in outcome accountability policies across the nation.