Black students’ low test scores caused Will C. Wood Middle School to miss its No Child Left Behind goals. But the Sacramento school met NCLB after all by persuading parents of four previously “black” children to let the school reclassify their kids as white or American Indian. Blacks, who are 17 percent of students at Wood according to GreatSchools.net, are now statistically insignificant. Their scores don’t count. From the Sacramento Bee:
Principal Jim Wong reviewed the files of all the students classified as African American on the test, he said, and found that four of them had indicated no race or mixed race on their enrollment paperwork. Wong sent his staff to talk to the four families to ask permission to put the kids in a different racial group.
“You get a kid that’s half black, half white. What are you going to put him down as?” Wong said. “If one kid makes the difference and I can go white, that gets me out of trouble.”
It’s not just Wood Middle School.
Over the past two years, 80 California schools got “out of trouble” with No Child Left Behind after changing the way they classify their students, a Bee analysis has found. The changes nudged their status from failing to passing under the federal law.
NCLB was designed to spot low achievement by subgroups at schools where the majority of students are doing fine. But why teach ‘em when you can disappear ‘em?
“Passing” meant something else, originally, I think.
Now you fail, you pass. Beats working.
“But why teach ‘em when you can disappear ‘em? ”
The thinking behind this is bizarre. Why is it “disappearing” a kid if he’s half white? You appear to think that because he’s doing poorly, he should be classified as black. A very weird application of the one-drop rule.
I need to put some thought into this, because your story brings up two contradictory views I hold. First, I support breaking down school performance by ethnicity, in order to shine a light on students the school isn’t reaching. Second, I have posted many times on “the folly of race”.
Perhaps I need to reexamine how to shine that light on underperforming students without using race?
Oh, Cal, get a grip. She’s complaining that they’re not bothering to teach the kid in the first place. It’s first class discrimination (two ways!) to pencil-whip a kid from black to white, just so you don’t have to bother teaching him. Hiding lower-scoring kids in amongst the higher-scoring kids just hides the fact that you’re short changing the lower-scoring kids.
The kids who were switched weren’t necessarily low scoring. They could have had perfect scores for all we know. By switching them from black to white, the school reduced the total number of black students enough so that it would no longer have to look at black students as a subgroup. The entire subgroup disappears.
I remember how happy I was when we finally got laws passed removing racial classification from public records – my 1952 Army discharge identified me as Race Cau – and my political and activist actions were directed toward the elimination of official racial classification. I was dismayed when illegal and unconstitutional racial classification was smuggled back.
True, MPH, but the purpose (and effect) was to hide low-scoring students. It doesn’t really matter whether the poor performers were those 4 kids or the other 96 who remained classified as black.
Wouldn’t the same idea work for universities or high schools that are trying to raise Hispanic or black graduation rate. A university would just been to adjust its student data so that anyone born in New Mexico, Texas, or Arizona gets listed as Hispanic. That way the percentage of Hispanic students that are graduating goes up without messy Mentoring programs, special dorms, or scholarship programs that can get a school sued.
Or a high school or college could just take the family heritage homework where students write down their family trees and use it to reclassify students into the proper minority groups.
During the aparthied regime in South Africa, there were concerns about how to classify those whose background was complicated. It was necessary to know for sure what the person’s group was so that the appropriate discriminations could be applied.
Those were called race courts. Their judges, presumably, would like a new gig and this sort of thing seems just the ticket.
This just highlights arsinine implementation of NCLB by California… if the status can be changed by alteration of four pieces of data, the system is broken.
The irony is, this would just be a return to status quo ante NCLB. If no one enquires as to the performance of subgroups, no problem! And if there are no consequences for neglecting to educate a subgroup, once more, no problem! Of course, the population bearing the cost for this reclassification would be the children…
What I really appreciated during my military service was having a published, minimum acceptable level of performance for every position/job. There were NO sub-categories nor special needs accomodations allowed…you could either do it, or, you could not do it.
What part of “can do”/”can’t do” do we misunderstand!?
I blogged on this same topic, seeking the reconciliation of the beliefs I mentioned in my comment above. If anyone has ideas….
You have to admire the thriftiness and creativity of administrators when covering their own azzes.
Rather then diagnose and solve a problem they just define it out of existence. Or rather they define it out of existence as a problem for which they’re responsible. The weighty intellect who came up with this solution’ll probably be rewarded with a promotion. Having solved the problem of having to deal with a problem a promotion’s only right.
It isn’t an application of the “one drop” rule. It is just an interesting – if ironic – way to cook the books. NCLB was supposed to be an objective measure of how a school was doing. Apparently it isn’t, not if the schools can hide their problems with a bit of statistical sleight of hand.
And why is the schools grade dependent on race-based reporting anyway? Either the kids are leaning or they aren’t – race shouldn’t enter into it.
Pretty sad. Actually the National School Board Association (and my own local school board as well) advocates chopping kids up. If a kid is both disabled and African American, they should only count as half a kid in each category (I don’t know if this means that no kid could count as more than one third, since each would have an ethnicity, a gender and a socio-economic status–or if they intend this to apply only to the troublesome minorities).
Yes–there is goofiness when it comes to trying to define either race or ethnicity (both pretty arbitrary and inconsequential from a biological standpoint), but given our history of discrimination based on the above, I support the disaggregation of general categories (and their typical self-definitions). Even socio-economic status is at best a proxy measurement–yet yields some pretty important approximations of how well we are doing at meeting educational needs–and based on what.
But cooking the books is cooking the books, plain and simple. Ask some simple questions–what bias is introduced by the actions of these administrators (that of making the school look better on paper), and who benefits (umm–the administrators?) Research inevitably is hampered by bias, but responsible administrators act to minimize it. Unethical administrators introduce it for their own benefit. Forgive the pun, but let’s call a spade a spade.
I blogged on this story as well last week. It’s a kind of dishonest but clever solution to saving your school from increasing penalties, given that they apparently made AYP in all other areas. This kind of solution only works when the numbers are at the tipping point AND your progress otherwise is satisfactory. A school that is failing in every way will not be able to save themselves with this.
http://dancallahan.net/2008/04/27/schools-play-the-game-to-save-themselves
“And why is the schools grade dependent on race-based reporting anyway? Either the kids are leaning or they aren’t – race shouldn’t enter into it.”
Race enters into it because historically schools could “hide” failing minority groups in the larger group average. An example (extreme to make the point): Consider a school with a 90% graduation rate. Looks pretty good and is above the national average. Things looks a *bit* different, though, if the graduation rate is 100% for the white kids who make up 90% of the school and 0% for the black kids who make up the remaining 10%.
NCLB breaks out by race/ethnicity so that situations like the hypothetical one above show that every black child is failing to graduate from the school even though the school’s average is quite good on the whole.
Whether we *should* care about things like this is a separate issue, but this is *why* NCLB breaks things out the way it does.
-Mark Roulo
“She’s complaining that they’re not bothering to teach the kid in the first place.”
No. Really? Get out. I’m astonished.
“It isn’t an application of the “one drop†rule.”
Joanne’s post is. The switch is, as you say, an innovative way out of a dumb problem.
Well, in NY York to avoid being a failing school, they got the administration to let the top scoring class in each grade level opt out of the std testing, since they didn’t need it. Naturally, those were the higher scoring white kids.
Voila. Next year NY State was crowing about what a great job it was doing closing the racial gap. They mentioned, at the end of the report, that they didn’t know why the grades of the white kids were falling.
Then teachers wonder why taxpayers close their wallets?