20 U.S.C. § 5801: Purpose

promoting coherent, nationwide, systemic education reform; improving the quality of learning and teaching in the classroom and in the workplace; defining appropriate and coherent Federal, State, and local roles and responsibilities for education reform and lifelong learning; building a broad national consensus on American education reform; assisting in the development and certification of high-quality, internationally competitive content and student performance standards; and assisting in the development and certification of high-quality assessment measures that reflect the internationally competitive content and student performance standards; supporting new initiatives at the Federal, State, local, and school levels to provide equal educational opportunity for all students to meet high academic and occupational skill standards and to succeed in the world of employment and civic participation; creating a vision of excellence and equity that will guide all Federal education and related programs; providing for the establishment of high-quality, internationally competitive content and student performance standards and strategies that all students will be expected to achieve; encouraging and enabling all State educational agencies and local educational agencies to develop comprehensive improvement plans that will provide a coherent framework for the implementation of reauthorized Federal education and related programs in an integrated fashion that effectively educates all children to prepare them to participate fully as workers, parents, and citizens; providing resources to help individual schools, including those serving students with high needs, develop and implement comprehensive improvement plans; and promoting the use of technology to enable all students to achieve the National Education Goals; stimulating the development and adoption of a voluntary national system of skill standards and certification to serve as a cornerstone of the national strategy to enhance workforce skills; and assisting every elementary and secondary school that receives funds under this chapter to actively involve parents and families in supporting the academic work of their children at home and in providing parents with skills to advocate for their children at school.