Real graduation requirement reform needed at national level

Frontiersman editorial board

Alaska's Department of Education and Early Development is looking at changes to the way students with disabilities are tested for high school graduation. Public comments will be taken Aug. 16 in Juneau, or at the Talking Book Library in Anchorage on the same date (see related Page A1 article).

The proposed changes are partly inspired by the White House's No Child Left Behind act and by the related Annual Yearly Progress testing.

This year's AYP results for the Mat-Su Borough School District will be released soon, and preliminary indications are that challenges still remain as the district, like school districts all over the country, struggles to make sense of the president's education program. Mat-Su administrators have said the concept behind No Child Left Behind is good, but the problem has been in the implementation. The program has not been effectively funded at the federal level, so the burden to administer a flawed program has fallen to local districts, logistically and economically.

AYP testing forces schools to navigate a maze of academic trapdoors.

It essentially judges all students -- average, exceptional and those with learning disabilities -- by one yardstick, and it punishes individual schools when any one group fails to measure up.

State education department proposals would allow challenged students to take alternative tests giving them a chance for a diploma, and would provide a more accurate assessment of their abilities. Without a diploma, many of these students would struggle to find employment after graduation. The alternatives will not weaken the meaning of a high school diploma; they will simply afford all students the opportunity to benefit from their individual progress.

The danger now is that struggling student groups, including Alaska Natives, may become targets if a reasonable solution to AYP and No Child Left Behind is not found. Because inflexible and unreasonable standards can bring down an entire school, parents may begin to question special education programs, and other practices that put a school at risk. The intent of No Child Left Behind was to improve education for all students, but the reality is something else. It's time to put the decision-making process back into the hands of educators and parents, and create an assessment program that measures progress and rewards schools that do well instead of punishing schools that fail -- especially when failure is all but guaranteed by unattainable goals.