This op-ed by Secretary Margaret Spellings appeared in USA Today on October 20, 2005.

If it's Halloween, it must be time to scare the children. This time the bogeyman is testing. Critics claim it's a trick and that high schools should keep the treats—taxpayer dollars—without showing accountability for results.

This is nonsense. Accountability assessments are valuable tools. They let students see the rewards of hard work, teachers intervene before problems become intractable, and parents know if their child's school is measuring up. They're nothing to fear.

What is scary is an education system that keeps parents, educators and policymakers in the dark. That's what we had before the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB).

Under NCLB, students in grades 3-8 are assessed annually, based on state academic standards. Test scores are disaggregated so that students are no longer "hidden" by the averages and left behind.

The law is clearly working. Wednesday, the Nation's Report Card found historic highs in fourth-grade math and reading and eighth-grade math. Hispanic and African-American fourth-graders made significant gains since 2003. An earlier report found more overall reading progress in the past five years than in the previous three decades.

Unfortunately, scores for high school students have barely budged. They need a boost. President Bush's High School Initiative would enable high schools to measure student performance in three grades and offer intensive, early instruction to students struggling with reading or math.

Reform is both a moral and an economic imperative. About 80% of the fastest-growing jobs will require some postsecondary education. Yet studies have found less than half of high school graduates ready for college-level math and science. Half of minority ninth-graders do not graduate on time. Would we accept a 50% success rate from a heart surgeon?

The current patchwork system is simply unreliable. Accountability testing has helped us close the achievement gap in early grades. It will work for high schools, too.

Governors and business leaders agree on the need for reform. We've seen what works—standards, accountability and testing. It's time to act. We have nothing to fear but a future for which our children are unprepared.

Margaret Spellings is U.S. secretary of Education.