John of Discriminations sent an interesting article my way about the stumbling blocks that NCLB has placed in the path of some diverse Delaware schools. Delaware is proud of its diverse student body - one of the most diverse in the country - but has discovered that when it comes to federal education reform, this diversity can be a liability:
...many Delaware schools and districts failed last month to make the grade under the No Child Left Behind Act...Though intended to make sure subgroups of students - black, poor, special education, non-English speaking - succeed in school, the law is counter-productive...
"It does a lot of very bad things like undermine integrated schools," said Gary Orfield of Harvard University, an expert on school desegregation who has worked for the state on desegregation issues. Under the law, the more integrated a school or district, the more subgroups it has. Hence, the more proficiency targets or benchmarks to meet because each subgroup has targets in math and reading, as well as overall targets in social studies and science. Some Delaware districts have as many as 34 targets.
In a mostly all-white or all-black school or district, there can be as few as five. Miss one target and the school or district fails to meet the federal standard.
One professor concludes that the more integrated the school, the higher the failure rate will be, simply because there are more targets to meet and less students who contribute to each target. But the subgroup targeting plan in NCLB is there for a reason. It's to prevent schools from raising student achievement as a whole while leaving the performance of certain student subgroups unchanged. Does the subgroup target plan make it more difficult for a school to get a good score? Yes it does - but it also prevents schools from ignoring any of their subgroups.
One solution would be to relax the law so that schools would still need to show growth by subgroups, but only a certain percentage of the subgroups would need to show significant improvement. This would reduce the occurrence of absurdities such as schools with 20 subgroups, and 19 passing scores, that receive a failing grade.
What's more, Delaware's administrators insist that their school are already performing well, and that they shouldn't be punished simply because they have more targets to meet:
Weeks earlier, test results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, a federal measure of how well students are doing, showed that Delaware had moved from the bottom third to the top third of the states academically. And it led the nation in overall point gain in the test scores.
Moreover, those test results also show that Delaware's test scores for black, Hispanic and low-income students are higher than the national averages for those groups on both the reading and writing tests...But No Child Left Behind makes no room in its rating system for that kind of success...And because of No Child Left Behind, most states are just starting the state accountability testing that Delaware has had for six years, another anomaly that could make its situation difficult. Test scores rise more quickly in the first years of school reform than in the later years.
Between the large number of targets and the higher overall performance on test scores, I agree that Delaware's administrators deserve a break.
Posted by kswygert at September 16, 2003 10:31 AM