School standards

can do more

harm than good

What has become a greatly anticipated - and feared - event the last three years came around at the end of last week when the state Department of Education issued its annual report card on public schools.

That assessment is based on standardized testing of third- through 10th-graders, as mandated by the federal No Child Left Behind Act. Test results are analyzed and broken down into 31 different student categories, including those with disabilities or with limited proficiency in English, along with racial and economic factors.

The news was mixed for the local school district. There was individual category improvement in some schools, but overall, 18 schools - the same number as last year - failed to meet what is defined as "adequate yearly progress."

The problem, however, is in that definition. If a school misses the adequate yearly progress standard in just one of the 31 sub-groups, then the whole school suffers the indignity of being black-listed. Penalties increase if a school continues to fall short of the overall standard in consecutive years, regardless of improvement shown within individual subgroups.

Since its passage into law in 2002, No Child Left Behind has been the source of controversy. From its start, it has been long on directives, but short on the funding necessary to meet some of those directives.

Congress has begun to question the usefulness of the law and the fairness of holding schools accountable without providing the financial means for them to meet standards.

Additionally, the federal law is based on a model - the Houston (Texas) School District - which has since proven to be flawed. Statistics used to bolster the case for nationwide education standards were, in some cases, fraudulently reported to make individual schools look good.

In states that have used standardized tests as a measure of school adequacy for longer than required by the federal government, evidence is mounting that curricula have evolved that are geared toward the test itself, rather than to general learning.

Most potentially devastating, though, is that the law does not recognize differences in the capacity of individual students to learn. Special education students and students for whom English is often an unmastered second language are held to the same academic standards as the rest of the student body.

Is it fair that when one of these subgroups comes up short, no amount of demonstrated excellence on the part of the rest of the student body will keep the school out of federal hot water?

Mat-Su School District officials are quick to say that local schools have a lot to offer and a lot to be proud of. That's not all spin. There is much that our schools are doing right. But they are saddled with a system that penalizes everyone for the "shortcomings" of a few.

No one should be opposed to accountability. No one wants, or benefits from, sub-par schools. But No Child Left Behind, in its present one-size-fits-all form, is not the answer. Honest progress needs to be measured in a way that acknowledges the uniqueness of each student and ensures that when students graduate they are proficient in more than just filling in circles on standardized tests.

More information about the No Child Left Behind Act can be found on the World Wide Web at the following sites:

€ U.S. Department of Education, www.ed.gov

€ National Education Association, www.nea.org