No education conference these days would be complete without talk of the federal No Child Left Behind law, and this year’s NYSSBA convention is no exception.

New York state Education Commissioner Richard Mills defended the law during question and answer session this afternoon. He said that NCLB, despite its “rough edges”, has “helped us in a major way.”

He expressed support for the grades 3 through 8 standardized testing implemented under the law. Unlike the former system—which only tested students in grade 4 and 8—the new testing practices have shown that performance trails off after grade 5, Mills said.

The tests, he said, help school officials “to find the danger points and intervene.”

A school board member from Long Beach challenged Mills: she voiced an oft-heard criticism—that all the testing stymies creativity and forces teachers “to teach to the test.”

Mills didn’t disagree—he said he’d seen it happen. But he also said he’d seen “extraordinary creativity” in classrooms and students who do well on the tests because they’re reading, writing and doing math problems. Mills basically implied that tedious practice tests aren’t and shouldn’t be the answer.

Students, he said, need to be prepared to be “thoughtful, responsible, literate and numerate.”

Mills was careful to include a caveat in the beginning of his remarks on NCLB—his thoughts on the law, he said, might put him in the minority.

When it comes to teachers at least, poll numbers indicate that he’s right.