No Child Left Behind standards will be eased for schools that educate most students adequately but fail with some subgroups. From the Chicago Tribune:
A school that missed only one achievement target, for example, could get a more favorable label and less severe sanctions than a school that missed several achievement goals.
. . . In Illinois, for example, 150 schools were labeled underperforming last year, only because special education students did not make the grade.
Fordham’s Michael Petrilli called the proposal the “suburban schools relief act,” warning that suburban schools might feel less pressure to improve the performance of poor, minority or disabled students.
Eduwonk says the feds aren’t changing accountability standards, just differentiating the designations for schools that don’t don’t meet the standards.
Measuring and holding schools accountable for the performance of all sub groups was one of the things I liked about NCLB. It gave no free pass for the predominantly white affluent schools if they really weren’t doing a better job with all the kids. Now, we’re going back to labeling most schools with complicated demographic mixes bad and others with easy-to-educate demographics good.
It’s only been years that teachers have been chanting differentiation in the schools, and it’s about time that theory extended beyond the classroom. But it’s a shame that it took so long. Let’s face it, some damage has already been done. The Hill talks about accountabilty, but what about the Schools Left Behind from the blanket definition of failures under NCLB?
Some schools facing cuts went to extreme measures to address their failings. Some graduated students from Special Ed programs, or refused entrance to it, in order for their numbers to be low enough to not qualify their Special Ed population as a sub group. Others instructed teachers to focus only on certain demographics’ learning levels, those of the middle group achievers. Many teachers were told that they needed to focus their attention on these middle-level achievers rather then challenging the higher level students or focusing on the struggling students because, statistically, it would give a school’s scores more “bang for their buck.”
Sure, one can blame the school for their decisions, but when faced with school-wide and district-wide budget cuts, many schools desperately believed that they needed to first address the threat of the guillotine over their heads before taking away their focus on things like educating their student body.
NCLB has been distracting in its strictness. It has taken focus from true learning, and instead, turned our attention to avoiding the consequences of a fear-mongering law.