I heard a news story on the radio where a US Rep, IIRC, announced how “No Child Left Behind” scoring (or however success is measured) does not count the lower eshelon. Did anyone else hear this report? If so, can you help me find a cite to article(s) on this? And, what (if anything) is being done about this now that the truth has come out?
(I put this in Great Debates because I am certain it might enrage those who believe this program is actually doing something for our children. I mean…something meaningful and worthwhile, that is.)
The way I’ve heard/read the story reported, it’s not about how the scores are being counted, but how they’re being presented. The state is required to include the score of every student when they report on the overall progress of their students. However, when they break the data into groups (like by race, disability status, or whatever), they can omit groups that they deem small enough to be statistically meaningless, or to protect the students’ privacy. The argument is that the states are using this loophole arbitrarily to exclude underperforming groups and make their numbers look better at first glance. But all of the scores are still there and are still on the report in other sections-- it’s not like their graded tests are just being fed into a shredder.
I read an article on this several days ago. Almost 2,000,000 scores are being omitted through this loophole and most of them are minorities or special education students. Some are the scores of non-English speaking students.
I can understand leaving out the scores of non-English speaking students, autistic students, and those who are physically incapable of taking the test. That has been one of my complaints from the beginning about the way the test has been set up. (Why should a school be penalized because it is the only high school in the city that provides classes for autistic students, for example?) But I don’t understand all of the loopholes.
The design has been flawed from the beginning. In our public school system, for example, under NCLB you would be more likely to be fired if you volunteer to teach in schools with high drop out rates and many discipline problems than you would if you volunteered to teach in the academic magnet school. Doh! Which would you choose?
Not only is NCLB making current shool administrators cook the books, the school districts on which NCLB was modeled were committing wholesale fraud as well.
NYTimes report from 2003 on how they’re shuffling kids around to (cue the ironic music) make sure to leave them behind for good.
(Google NCLB Fraud to find out what actually happened in Texas’ schools when they had to exist under NCLB’s predecessor. Basically, they had to make their numbers, so they damn well made their numbers by any means possible.)
It’s not a loophole. NCLB requires minimal requirement of assessment passage for the school as a whole AND each subgroup. This is to prevent a situation where a school “passes” the NCLB requirements because most of the white and Asian students pass the test but half of the traditional low achieving groups (black, Hispanic, American Indian, etc.) fail. However, is it fair when a subgroup (and therefore the entire school) fails to make the Federal standard because there are three students in the group and 2 do great while the other one bombs it?
The requirements for eliminating a subgroup scores are not arbitrary nor are they left up to the school. First of all, 95% of every subgroup’s scores must be reported. If not, the school fails. Second, a subgroup is statisticaly insignificant if it has 30 or less students (I believe).
The only benefit I’ve personally experienced or will experience is that because of this law, my kid doesn’t have to go to the crappy underperforming school that is in my area.
IIRC, it states that districts may not refuse transfer requests out of documented low-performing schools. Perfect for my situation. The elementary school that my son should go to is crap. One of the lowest per-student-spending in CA. For this reason, whenever I have computer upgrades at home, the oldies get donated to that school, and they’re happy to have them.
I KNOW that the parents there are simply not of the same educational mind as I. I feel sorry for the kids who do get “left behind” just because their parents are losers.
I agree with your post. By using the word “loophole” I didn’t mean to imply that something untoward is necessarily going on. I’m not an expert on the subject but my general impression is that this is just an honest misunderstanding of procedure that is being inflated to look like an insidious fraud because that makes a better news story.
The program is a scam. No Child Left Behind really means that federal money will be poured on upper class and middle class schools that already succeed, and schools in poor districts will lose money.
Why do they fail? The presumption is that they are simply doing a poor job and should be punished.
But they have the lowest amount of money to spend per student, resulting in the largest classes and the least experienced teachers.
The logical thing would be to forget about rewarding good schools and punishing bad schools, but instead concentrate on equalizing the resources available. This would mean not relying on local property taxes, and more on state taxes. And keep the federal taxes out of it.
Cite? Because my own anecdotal experience seems to run contrary to this. My company does IT consulting for a LOT of poor public and charter schools in the New Mexico/Arizona area. How do they pay for my services? They are all fully (90%…this means that for every dollar they spend on a specific and funded service the school pays .10 and the fed picks up the tab for the other .90. Of course the STATE also puts money in for poorer schools, that thats another matter) eRate funded. In addition they receive significant funding from NCLB for other stuff besides computers (LOTS of computers, one mandated in every classroom if they are in the program), T1’s(!!), new network infrastructure (switches, routers, even VoIP in some cases), phone service (including CELL service for teachers!!), multimedia equipment and software, etc etc. I’ve seen poor indian charter schools out in the boonies of NM with better infrastructure and connectivity than some mid-sized companies!
And here is a news flash…its the POORER schools who most benifit from this, at least in my own experiences. Richers schools ARE NOT ELEGIBLE (once they reace a certain level)! Its all based on the amount of free lunches provided to the student population…once you get behond a certain threshhold you drop to 80% funded…and then 70% funded, etc etc. At some point you basically fall off the map…because your school is considered too ‘rich’.
Now, all my knowledge on this is anecdotal based on my own experience with the school system from the perspective of an IT contractor providing service. If you would like to produce some cites that only the rich schools benifit then I’m more than willing to look it over.