California's doing some retooling to the NCLB regulations:
California education officials took a screwdriver Wednesday to some rigid rules regarding the controversial federal No Child Left Behind Act, saying the policies are potentially unfair to thousands of schools.
State Superintendent of Public Instruction Jack O'Connell announced 11 proposed changes in what was already a federally approved blueprint for how the state implements the education law...
For example, the superintendent said, California state law gives parents the right to opt their children out of standardized testing.
But the federal law punishes schools that fail to test at least 95 percent of students. Those schools are then deemed failures in meeting adequate yearly progress -- which could ultimately result in sanctions or loss of federal funding.
About 25 percent of the state's schools did not meet adequate yearly progress because they didn't test enough students -- not because the students didn't perform well enough, O'Connell said.
One of the changes proposed Wednesday would allow schools to count students who opt out of testing as "not proficient" instead of as a non-test taker. By doing so, schools would still have incentive to encourage students to take the test, but they wouldn't be punished in the head count if the parents decide to opt out.
If the state law allows parents to oppose testing by keeping their kids home, I agree that schools shouldn't be punished for this. There should be some way to distinguish between schools that fail to test kids and parents that refuse to have their kids tested.
At first, I thought the schools would still suffer thanks to those not-proficient scores for the opt-outers. But it's possible that, if the kids whose parents keep them home are kids who would have scored non-proficient anyway, the school's average remains where it would have been with those kids testing, and the school doesn't get punished for not testing enough kids.
Posted by kswygert at February 26, 2004 11:04 AM