|
Left Behind
No Child Left Behind has struck again.
This year, the math scores are so scrambled, it’ll be October before school administrators know how schools performed. Reading scores were released this week. Some schools are on the bubble for making Adequate Yearly Progress, or AYP. How schools do on AYP has a significant impact on how officials budget for and plan the school year.
With no math scores, there’s no way to determine which schools must offer options for students to transfer to other schools, if supplement learning should be offered to other students, or which schools might get special improvement teams. Basically, because of the problems with math tests, schools that need a year’s worth of help will only get half a year’s worth.
All this notwithstanding, nobody is happy with NCLB. It is onerous for school officials and kills staff morale. Many parents are unhappy that teachers are forced to teach only for AYP test results. Then there’s the issue of how subgroups affect an entire school.
If NCLB did nothing else, it forced many states that didn’t have end-of-grade testing to implement it. Some quantification is needed to assess school performance. That part of NCLB should be its legacy.
Only 8 percent of school funding is provided by the federal government while 80 percent of the rules and regulations are federally mandated.
You do the math. It doesn’t add up.