{"id":7176,"date":"2006-04-19T09:46:55","date_gmt":"2006-04-19T13:46:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com\/?p=7176"},"modified":"2006-04-19T09:46:55","modified_gmt":"2006-04-19T13:46:55","slug":"nclb-scheme-lets-states-omit-minorities-test-scores","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/nclb-scheme-lets-states-omit-minorities-test-scores\/","title":{"rendered":"NCLB scheme lets states omit minorities’ test scores"},"content":{"rendered":"

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<\/a> from nearly two million minority students.<\/p>\n

[E]ducators are creating a false picture of academic progress.<\/p>\n

“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.”<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Sounds like quite a scam.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7176","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7176","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7176"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7176\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7176"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7176"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7176"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}