A troubling federal plan for schools
Milford Daily News
Editorial
February 1, 2003
If you think MCAS is a headache, wait until you meet "No Child Left Behind."
That's the message local educators heard from a panel of experts at a forum in Marlborough this week. The No Child Left Behind Act, passed by Congress a year ago, is well-intentioned all seemed to agree, but its unintended consequences may undermine its promise.
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Under the law, every grade of every school must show improved test scores to demonstrate "adequate yearly progress" or AYP. But it's more complicated than that. In a commendable effort to close the achievement gap between white and minority students, the scores are broken out to determine if AYP is being made by major racial and ethnic groups, by various income groups, by students with disabilities and students with limited English proficiency.
Here's the catch: Every subgroup in every grade must show progress every year on every test against specified goals. If even one subgroup comes up short - if this year's limited English second-graders do worse on the math test than last year's, for instance - the entire school is put on probation.
For failing schools, intervention and sanctions begin to kick in immediately. If a school fails to show adequate yearly progress for two years in a row, its students are given the option to transfer to another pubic school in the district. And, if there's no room in another school? At this point, federal officials are saying the district has to add space and teachers, to accommodate those students.
Sanctions get even more serious if a school fails a third, fourth, or fifth consecutive year. Teachers can be dismissed and, after five years, the school must be converted to a charter school, turned over to a private management company, or taken over by the state.
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Then there is the funding. Extra money was supposed to accompany this new mandate, but already Bush is backsliding. Kennedy boycotted a White House ceremony marking the bill's first birthday because, he said, funding promises have not been kept.
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