No Statistically Significant Child Left Behind

Dammit! Dubya seems to be the Anti-Midas. Everything he touches turns to crap. Apparently there is a big loophole in his misbegotten No Child Left Behind program that allow schools to disregard minority scores if there are less than a 'statistically significant' number of them. For those of you unfamiliar with this plan, all children in the US in third grade and higher are now tested annually on their reading and math skills. All grades are reported, and the school's overall grade determines such things as further funding, and whether administrators get to keep their jobs. In theory this is too ensure that all schools provide quality education...in fact it just means that teachers now waste a good part of the school year teaching kids how to pass these tests. But now it appears that there is yet another problem. The grades are also broken down by race, poverty, migrant status, English proficiency and special education. But if such groups are not statistically significant, i.e. too few in number, schools are allowed to omit their scores in order to preserve their anonymity. However, statistically significant means different things to different people. In Tennessee, if there are 45 or fewer students of a given minority at a school, their grades are disregarded. More than 20 states have asked for larger and larger exemptions, some disregarding groups as large as fifty students! While I'm sure that there are a very few schools where this means a handful of white kids' grades are thrown out, the vast majority of the ignored are Black, or Hispanic, or Asian, or Native American. The Associated Press estimates that 1.9 million students across the country are having their grades ignored, and very few of these are white students.

Now I'll be the first to admit that the American educational system is more screwed up than Keith Richards at Mardi Gras, but No Child Left Behind isn't the fix it needs. What it needs is better teacher training and pay, smaller class sizes, and more parental involvement. Stop wasting everyone's time with standardized tests that prove nothing other than that schools can teach a test, and give educators the resources to educate. Our elementary school teachers are some of the most overworked, underpaid, and abused people in our country, and rather than foisting on them some useless test with a federally approved catch phrase attached to it, how about we funnel some of the money going to tear up the Arctic, or various Middle Eastern countries, to the schools,and truly leave no child behind.

If you can read this, thank a teacher. :-)
Marius


source: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060418/ap_on_go_ot/no_child_loophole