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Wednesday, March 19, 2008
Will flexibility improve NCLB?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings announced a pilot program aimed to differentiate between schools that need help in many areas to make Adequate Yearly Progress and schools with just a small number of students missing the mark.
Spellings described this program as “differentiated accountability.” Basically up to 10 states will have more freedom in how they sanction schools that fail to meet the performance targets required under No Child Left Behind.
NCLB says all students should perform at grade level by 2014. To meet that goal, schools must reach certain benchmarks on specific tests every year. Schools are judged on scores for all children and subgroups of students. If just one group misses the mark, the entire school can fail. Schools missing the mark for consecutive years face increasingly severe sanctions, ranging from allowing students to transfer to better-performing schools to a takeover by the state.
The law breaks down schools’ test scores in more than 35 categories. School A may fail in 20 areas, while School B may miss one. As the law stands now, both schools would be viewed as “in need of improvement” and face the same punishment.
The pilot program would change that. School A would receive extensive intervention from the state and face harsh sanctions. School B would help its few struggling students without being labeled underperforming or facing sanctions.
The change addresses criticism that the law labels too many effective schools as failing. But this isn’t the overhaul many critics hoped for. One anti-NCLB group described the program as “the political equivalent of rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.”
Do you think this flexibility will improve NCLB?
