Where Next For Standards-Based Reform?

Over at Foresight, Jal Mehta proposes that standardistas should focus on deepening and strengthening progress on standards and accountability that have come through NCLB rather than on pushing for national standards and tests:

"Rather than inviting another fight over testing and federal power, policy energy should focus on the critical questions that NCLB has brought to the fore but left unanswered...This is clearly the next frontier for the standards-based approach: what ideas can their proponents offer that will make their laudably ambitious target goals (nearly all children proficient by 2014) a reality?"