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More worry and
cynicism very early in the New Year.
So glad I didn’t resolve to avoid being skeptical. Karen Excerpts: States Worry New Law Sets Schools Up to Fail By Michael A.
Fletcher, Washington Post Staff Writer, 01.02.03 @ http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A64246-2003Jan1.html NEW ORLEANS -- State
education officials are warning that a new federal education law's requirement
that each racial and
demographic subgroup
in a school show annual improvement on standardized tests will result in the
majority of the nation's schools being deemed failing. The likelihood that
the law would force them to label the majority of their schools "low
performing" is complicating efforts by state educational officials to meet
a Jan. 31 deadline for submitting plans for implementing
key parts of the federal "No Child Left Behind" law. They say federal regulations outlining
how to assess the quality of schools are dangerously arbitrary and inflexible and will result in schools being treated
as failures -- even if they are improving by most measures. "I don't know of any state that isn't facing pretty staggering
numbers in terms of schools not meeting" the new law's requirements, said Michael
E. Ward, superintendent of schools in North Carolina and president of the Council
of Chief State School Officers. "A piece of legislation
that we think has very worthy goals risks being undone by its own negative
weight." 2) The problem being cited by many state and local officials is
that the law also
requires school systems to raise the achievement levels of students in each of
five racial and ethnic subgroups, as well as
among low-income students, those with limited English skills and disabled
students every year. Any deviation from steady improvement in any
of the subgroups for two consecutive years results in a school
being called low-performing. Accountability experts
say that requirement, coupled with the year-to-year deviations that typically occur in standardized
test results, means
that schools would
often be deemed low-performing for what amounts to statistical -- rather than educational -- reasons. 3) "Even
in large schools, you are dealing with small numbers of students in some of
these subgroups," said
Richard K. Hill, executive director of the National Center for the Improvement of
Educational Assessment, a
consultant for 10 states developing accountability plans. "There
is a strong likelihood that a school's scores will go up and down based solely on
the performance of just a small handful of students." 4) "At
best, I think the law is an unwarranted intrusion into state and local control
of schools," said
Bill Weinberg, who quit the Kentucky Board of Education in November in protest of the federal law. "At worst, it is a cynical attempt
by the Bush administration to build in failure and use that as an argument for
vouchers." Outgoing mail
scanned by NAV 2002 |
