Report: States gaming NCLB system

[flashl]

On paper, Alabama last year showed remarkable gains in improving its schools. But a new report claims that Alabama – and a number of states – are manipulating statistics to make their schools appear better than they really are.

The report released Tuesday (Nov. 13) by Education Sector, a nonpartisan think tank in Washington, D.C., contends states are gaming the system under the federal No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), the 2002 law that measures states’ annual progress toward getting all students reading and doing math at grade level by 2014.

In a ranking based on 11 statistics that states annually report to the U.S. Education Department, Alabama jumped to 5th place in the country in how well it appears to be meeting various education measures, up from 22nd place last year, the group found. The percentage of its schools showing the amount of improvement required by federal law zoomed in one year from half to almost 90 percent, according to the report.

“This didn’t happen because Alabama students learned much more in 2006 than they did in 2005,” the report said. It happened because the state exploited loopholes in the law and set low standards for its statewide test so that more students passed those tests, inflating the state’s record in meeting the law’s benchmarks, according to the report.

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Surprised? No.

[dbt]

1. Serves the Regime right.

NCLB is just a(nother) scam to enrich a few bu$h cronies. It has nothing to do with students learning anything. I hope more states follow Alabama's lead.

:evilgrin:

[sam sarrha]

2. i lived in texas during Bu$h, he hid the 46% high school drop out rate of no child left behind, with

fancy math.. gov perry quietly hid the truth in a 4 line article in the back of the papers.. to keep from taking the fall for it himself right after the election.. they called it a clerical error

so oit had to have been known and shamelessly deliberately perpetrated against out children.. with what price in life long suffering.!!

[flashl]

3. Its a scam. Its all about selective reporting.

With the approval of the U.S. Department of Education, many states are reporting educational results under NCLB that defy reality and common sense. In so doing, they are undermining the effectiveness of the law.

The result is a system of perverse incentives that rewards state education officials who misrepresent reality. Their performance looks better in the eyes of the public and they're able to avoid conflict with organized political interests. By contrast, officials who keep expectations high and report honest data have more hard choices to make and are penalized because their states look worse than others by comparison.

It's difficult for teachers and students to focus on academic achievement when schools aren't safe. But while a recent report from the U.S. Department of Education and the U.S. Department of Justice found that overall school violence is down, it also found that violence, theft, bullying, drugs, and weapons are still “widespread.” NCLB gives students in “persistently dangerous” schools the right to transfer elsewhere. But in their 2006 NCLB reports, states asserted that only 28 of the nation's 95,000 schools are persistently dangerous. As Table 5 shows, only six states reported any persistently dangerous schools at all.

One of those states, Maryland, set standards for dangerousness based on the number of student expulsions or suspensions for arson, sexual assault, physical attacks on student or adults, and possession of drugs, firearms, explosives and other weapons.

Yet many states created standards similar to those in Arizona, which only labels schools as dangerous if an average of four or more firearms are brought to school for three consecutive years. Arizona ignores rape, gang violence, readily available illegal narcotics, and many other indisputably dangerous things. The state has not identified a single persistently dangerous school.

Students graduating from schools as 95-99 proficient in reading and math must enter remedial courses in college.