The Choice Channel

President Bush was riding high several years ago when he decided it was time to improve America’s public school systems. He rolled out his administration’s No Child Left Behind Act and all the people rejoiced. Finally! Finally the federal government was going to do something about failing public schools in America. Great promises were made of improvements and innovations. Legislation was enacted and more regulations were created. Enforcement was to be strict for the standards set for testing and teacher qualification. All of this was “for the children.” Even the name of the legislation itself declares that no child will be left behind in America’s schools. How is it then that four years after President Bush signed into law the No Child Left Behind Act, nearly two million students’ test scores are not counted toward progress reports of their racial groups; and, almost eighteen hundred schools across the country fall short of the federal guidelines? You do not have to be a college professor to figure out that some children are still being left behind.

Many critics of NCLB have seen it as a shaky house of cards from its inception. Teacher’s groups, parents, unions and even the National Education Association have voiced opposition to this huge one-size-fits-all program. Well, the foundation of that shaky house of cards began to crumble about a month ago when the Associated Press released its report called States omit minorities’ school scores. According to the April 17th report, as published in the Belleville News-Democrat:

“States are helping public schools escape potential penalties by skirting the No Child Left Behind law’s requirement that students of all races must show annual academic progress. With the federal government’s permission, schools deliberately aren’t counting the test scores of nearly 2 million students when they report progress by racial groups, an Associated Press computer analysis found.”

Whoops! What’s this? A loophole? Apparently so and it allows educators to falsely represent academic progress within racial groups and hide failing tendencies within their schools. You see NCLB requires that twenty-five million students be tested in reading and math periodically; and, no scores can be excluded from the overall findings. But, according to the AP April 17th report:

“…the schools also must report scores by categories, such as race, poverty, migrant status, English proficiency and special education. Failure in any category means the whole school fails. States are helping schools get around that second requirement by using a loophole in the law that allows them to ignore scores of racial groups that are too small to be statistically significant.”

In other words, if you have a child who is in a racial group some bureaucrat deems “too small to be statistically significant” your child is, well, left behind. The fix is in. Public schools no longer have to educate these racial groups that are “too small to be statistically significant” because they can just discard their test results anyway. These minority students get stuck in failing schools while educators and politicians game the system. From the same AP report cited above:

“‘The states aren’t hiding the fact that they’re gaming the system,’ said Dianne Piche, executive director of the Citizens’ Commission on Civil Rights, a group that supports No Child Left Behind.”

The states don’t have to hide the fact that they are “gaming the system” because they are doing it with the federal government’s permission. Failure in any category means the whole school fails. If the whole school fails the federal dollars stop flowing to the school. If the money stops, the school closes. If the school closes, the children are left behind. I guess everyone figures that leaving almost two million children behind now is better than having to leave tens of millions of children behind later when they have to close all the schools due to poor performance. If NCLB is so rigid and unyielding that a small fraction of the students involved can cause whole schools to fail, it is little wonder the house of cards is beginning to fall.

Okay, so we know that some schools in all the states are gaming the No Child Left Behind system, but what about the rest of the schools? I’m afraid the answer is, “Not so good.” According to an article published by CNN on May 10th entitled, Rising number of schools face serious penalties:

“Falling short of requirements under President Bush’s education law, about 1,750 U.S. schools have been ordered into radical restructuring, subject to mass firings, closure, state takeover or other moves aimed at wiping their slates clean.”

No wonder the states are looking for loopholes. They are fighting for the survival of their school systems. And, there is growing concern that the number of schools ordered into restructuring will get much larger. Schools make the “failing list” when they fall short of federal guidelines in reading and math for five straight years. The number of schools making the list is up forty-four percent in the past year alone according to CNN, “…and is expected to swell by thousands in the next few years.”

While it is true that the 1,750 schools mentioned in the report represent around three percent of the schools that possibly face penalties under NCLB, Michael Petrilli, who used to be an enforcement official at the Education Department, said, “It’s just a matter of time before we see upwards of 10,000 schools in restructuring.” He elaborated:

“Unless all of these schools suddenly turn themselves around, or the states continue to find ways to finagle the system, you’re going to see the numbers accelerate.”

The states will do practically anything to keep “your” federal tax dollars flowing to “their” school systems. If it means gaming the system and ignoring millions of failing children in the process, so be it. Almost two million students this year were in groups “too small to be statistically significant.” It seems it is likely that millions more will be classified in such a way over the next several years. I hope one of your children is not being left behind just because some bureaucrat is afraid of losing his/her federal funding. What a shame that any child should be left behind only because they are seen as statistically irrelevant.