NCLB scheme lets states omit minorities’ test scores

April 19, 2006

The centerpiece of Bush’s No Child Left Behind program is testing at the state level, which the administration believes is critical in evaluating school performance. The Associated Press, however, did an interesting analysis this week and found that states — with the Bush administration’s permission — are evading NCLB penalties by not counting test scores from nearly two million minority students.

[E]ducators are creating a false picture of academic progress.

“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. “When you do the math … you see that far from this law being too burdensome and too onerous, there are all sorts of loopholes.”

The law signed by Bush in 2002 requires public schools to test more than 25 million students periodically in reading and math. No scores can be excluded from the overall measure.

But 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 figured out a way around this problem by taking advantage of a pretty big loophole. If a school has a small number of students from a specific racial group, the school can omit those students’ test scores from the overall total. If a school has 2,000 white students and nine Hispanics, the latter’s scores are excluded.

Who decides when a group is too small to count? The states do, and they take advantage of it all the time. Schools may have several dozen students from a minority group, but if officials aren’t happy with their test scores, the results are just ignored.

It’s a flawed system, to put it mildly. The administration insists the tests will help show which students need the most help, but the administration allows 2 million minority students’ results to be quietly set aside to help states avoid NCLB penalties.

Sounds like quite a scam.

Minorities become invisible when you cook the books…Piously proclaiming ” No Child Left Behind” when entire racial and ethnic populations are ignored.
It should be “No Lie left Behind”.

  • Any policy or porgram proposed by these people that has the appearance of being positive rarely has any teeth. Fewer teeth than a trailer park full of meth-heads, to be more precise.

    Loopholes are the key to all the Republikan legislation. They save the forests by allowing logging. They give us “Clear Skys” by excluding the worst polluting power plants from lowering emissions. Who is surprised that No Child Left Behind only applies to white kids.

    Did anyone catch the story yesterday about Lincoln Nebraska dividing their school district into three areas, one white, one, black, and one hispanic? I think it was on CNN. These people have no shame.

  • Well, I can’t say I’m surprised. After my nasty encounter trying to evaluate faith-based abstinence programs, I’m convinced that the evaluations for any Bush program are structured just so the group getting evaluated can fiddle with the process and get whatever result they want.

    Anyway, it’s a win-win situation for government. The states can safely keep the money coming and don’t have to sanction their underperforming schools, and Bush can say that the program he championed is successful (after all, if there are too many failures then one has to wonder if his program is so great after all).

  • MNProgressive,
    Actually, it’s here in Omaha, and I think it’s been skewed in it’s reporting.

    A state senator, Ernie Chambers, who is black and represents the mostly black district of North Omaha in the Unicameral, proposed breaking up the Omaha Public School system into three separate districts.
    More to come when I have a little more time, but contrary to the national reporting, this isn’t some evil plot to segregate the schools here in Omaha.

  • 2,

    I must have misread. I bet they were discussing it in Lincoln, being the capital and all. I’ll look for your follow-up. I did not ge thte impression that they were intentionally segregating the schools and the article did mention that the plan would not take effect for a year or more to allow a better solution to materialize. I also recall a statement about this plan allowing local leaders to have more control over their schools. I suppose that can be read as either good or bad. It does seem to speak to the level of division of racial groups in Omaha. It will be interesting to see what happens here.

    Thnx.

  • Thsi might not be so nefarious as people here are suggesting. My understanding is that minority scores can be excluded when there are too few minority students to produce a statistically significant measure of their scores and trends. While the program can and certainly will be abused, there are in fact objective mathematical methods for deciding when this is acceptable.

  • it doesn’t take a degree in psychology or advanced training in spotting liars to realize the President plays fast and loose with the truth. Dumbya is in trouble is undeniable but his people are not problem. His lies, scams and policies are. It is these policies and scams, not his advisers that have given us secretive, a little-known secretive cabal, huge budget deficits, 12 million illegal aliens, a trade deficit running at $800 billion a year and a no-win $450 billion war that is bleeding our country, a toothless failed policy towards Iran. dumbya is now road kill on the rethugilican political super highway, a hopelessly lame-duck administration…Bushit is the amalgamation of all the hideous and sad parts of the Republican Party. He is a Republican Frankenstein. He has the temperament of Barry Goldwater, the integrity of Richard Nixon, and the brains of Dan Quayle.

  • Not only does this admin play fast and loose with the truth, but they play fast and loose with accountability. From the speech W gave at the Maryland middle school where he said science was cool(emphasis mine):

    first of all, let me just remind you what the No Child Left Behind Act, as far as I’m concerned, means. It means, one, you believe every child can learn; two, you refuse to accept a system that just shuffles kids through school because they happen to be a certain age. In other words, you use an accountability system — and by the way, we’ve insisted upon measurement in return for federal money; we didn’t say we’ll develop the tests for you — you develop your own accountability systems — but we expect there to be results when we spend money.

    So in other words, the Federal goverment wants to hold you accountable but we’re going to put you in charge of keeping yourself accountable.
    Nice system.

  • CB – I think you got it a slightly wrong when you write, “the school can omit those students’ test scores from the overall total.”

    The school can choose not to report a category (e.g. black students) if there are too few students in it, but those students still get counted in the overall total.

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