3/24/08

Columbus Dispatch Editorial

The failure of Congress, after a year of wrangling, to agree on an update to the 2002 No Child Left Behind law leaves its weaknesses unaddressed and leaves it to the Bush administration to exercise some executive tinkering.

Education Secretary Margaret Spellings said recently she plans to give up to 10 states permission to vary from the law’s one-size-fits-all penalties, which apply similar sanctions to all schools that fail to make adequate progress among certain groups of students. At present, the law makes no distinction between schools that miss the mark with only a group or two and those that are failing on nearly all measures.

The chosen states would be allowed to focus more intervention efforts on the most-troubled schools.

In this effort to fine-tune the law, federal officials shouldn’t lose sight of its essential purpose: ensuring that schools strive to meet the needs of all students, including those challenged by mental or physical handicaps, poverty and lack of fluency in English.

Critics claim that the administration is caving in to political pressure from schools that aren’t meeting the mark and aims to neuter the law rather than face the reality that thousands of schools are failing.

But facing reality may be exactly what would be accomplished in allowing for more gradations of progress in raising academic achievement among subgroups of students.

Current rules have left many generally strong schools branded as failures, based on the fact that only one or two subgroups failed to make adequate progress from one year to the next. Some consider this fair, based on the leave-none-behind philosophy: No school can succeed if anyone in it fails.

But that isn’t reality. Easing that all-or-nothing approach may be simply a wise acknowledgement that not every child can achieve at a standard level.

Spellings proposes what she calls triage — easing the penalties on schools that fail in very few categories, so that intervention efforts can be focused more on the schools with much deeper problems.

One critic called it the Suburban Schools Relief Act, because wealthy suburban districts have cried the loudest about being branded mediocre, despite exceeding almost every performance standard, because one or two subgroups didn’t improve enough.

Indeed, relatively successful schools shouldn’t get a pass to ignore the students who need extra help.

The key is maintaining the incentive — carrot or stick — to help all students, without inaccurately branding an excellent school as mediocre. A solution might lie in a less-simplistic ranking scheme.

A school or district that is performing well on the majority of measures should be recognized for that fact. But as long as one of the school’s groups, such as special-education students or those with limited English-speaking abilities, isn’t making adequate progress, that fact should be noted prominently and some incentive applied to the school.

Energy and resources should go toward those students who are struggling the most to meet standards. Focusing them broadly on schools where the problems are limited serves no good purpose.