Well. How very very special of the federal government to create this loophole, and how very very special of so many states to use it.
States are helping public schools escape potential penalties by skirting the No Child Left Behind law's requirement that students of all races must show annual academic progress. With the federal government's permission, schools deliberately aren't counting the test scores of nearly 2 million students when they report progress by racial groups, an Associated Press computer analysis found. Minorities who historically haven't fared as well as whites in testing make up the vast majority of students whose scores are being excluded, AP found. And the numbers have been rising.
"I can't believe that my child is going through testing just like the person sitting next to him or her and she's not being counted," said Angela Smith, a single mother. Her daughter, Shunta' Winston, was among two dozen black students whose test scores weren't counted to judge her suburban Kansas City, Mo., high school's performance by race.
Under the law championed by President Bush, all public school students must be proficient in reading and math by 2014, although only children above second grade are required to be tested. Schools receiving federal poverty aid also must demonstrate annually that students in all racial categories are progressing or risk penalties that include extending the school year, changing curriculum or firing administrators and teachers.
The U.S. Education Department said it didn't know the breadth of schools' undercounting until seeing AP's findings. "Is it too many? You bet," Education Secretary Margaret Spellings said in an interview. "Are there things we need to do to look at that, batten down the hatches, make sure those kids are part of the system? You bet."
Students whose tests aren't being counted in required categories include Hispanics in California who don't speak English well, blacks in the Chicago suburbs, American Indians in the Northwest and special education students in Virginia, AP found. Bush's home state of Texas once cited as a model for the federal law excludes scores for two entire groups. No test scores from Texas' 65,000 Asian students or from several thousand American Indian students are broken out by race. The same is true in Arkansas.
[...] States are helping schools get around that second requirement by using a loophole in the law that allows them to ignore scores of racial groups that are too small to be statistically significant. Suppose, for example, that a school has 2,000 white students and nine Hispanics. In nearly every state, the Hispanic scores wouldn't be counted because there aren't enough to provide meaningful information and because officials want to protect students' privacy.
State educators decide when a group is too small to count. And they've been asking the government for exemptions to exclude larger numbers of students in racial categories. Nearly two dozen states have successfully petitioned the government for such changes in the past two years. As a result, schools can now ignore racial breakdowns even when they have 30, 40 or even 50 students of a given race in the testing population.
[...] To calculate a nationwide estimate, AP analyzed the 2003-04 enrollment figures the government collected the latest on record and applied the current racial category exemptions the states use. Overall, AP found that about 1.9 million students or about 1 in every 14 test scores aren't being counted under the law's racial categories. Minorities are seven times as likely to have their scores excluded as whites, the analysis showed. Less than 2 percent of white children's scores aren't being counted as a separate category. In contrast, Hispanics and blacks have roughly 10 percent of their scores excluded. More than one-third of Asian scores and nearly half of American Indian scores aren't broken out, AP found....
Thing is, it's not so much that this gives an inaccurate impression of progress at any one school -- although it does. It's that when everything is cumulated, it gives a severely inaccurate impression of progress within a given city, state, or nationally, because the small numbers here and there balloon up to some rather impressive numbers when you add them together. (At a guess -- and noting that I have not seen the statistics used by AP -- I would guess that New Mexico, for example, likely excludes almost every black student from its scores. The numbers of black students in any one school -- with the possible exceptions of Albuquerque High and Valley High and their feeder schools, and perhaps the high schools in Las Cruces -- would be so very small as to make them statistically irrelevant ... until you start adding the numbers.)
It will be interesting to see what changes Congress makes ... if any. The law itself is a disaster from start to finish; it forces schools to teach to the tests rather than teaching more broadly based content. And now it's going to become a political football in an entirely different way; there may be no means by which this wretched law can be rescued to produce "politically palatable results." Unfortunately, the craven cowards in Congress also won't have the spine to say, "You know what? This is a bad law from beginning to end. Let's throw it out and actually think more about what to do to replace it, or to see if we even need to replace it."
Posted by iain at April 17, 2006 07:13 PM
