By Mike Norman
mnorman@star-telegram.com
It's called the No Child Left Behind Act, not the Almost No Child Left Behind Act and not Most Children Not Left Behind Act.
It's important to keep that in mind with Wednesday's news that almost half (47.8 percent) of the public schools, including charter schools, in Texas this year failed to meet the minimum requirements of that federal education accountability law.
In terms of school districts, including charter schools, 71.4 percent failed.
In Tarrant County, the districts failing to meet the Adequate Yearly Progress, or AYP, standard under the law include Arlington, Birdville, Crowley, Eagle Mountain-Saginaw, Everman, Fort Worth, Grapevine-Colleyville, Hurst-Euless-Bedford, Keller, Kennedale, Lake Worth, Mansfield, Northwest and White Settlement.
That's really ugly news. But what can it really mean? We're spending more than $40 billion a year in federal, state and local tax dollars on these schools. Are they not able to give us our money's worth?
Back up and look at what NCLB and AYP really are.
NCLB was the attempt by President George W. Bush, with the help of liberal Democrat Sen. Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts, to use on a national scale the kind of testing-based school accountability system he'd seen at work in Texas for two decades. The theory was to roll together the results of annual standardized testing, attendance monitoring and graduation rates to see how schools are doing from one year to the next.
The law required breaking down results so it's clear how performance compares among ethnic groups and for the economically disadvantaged.
When people have that sort of at-a-glance look at these performance indicators, the theory continues, they'll put pressure on those schools and districts that aren't hitting their marks, and they'll be forced to get better.
But if you're an elected official pushing that sort of effort -- and you give it a name like No Child Left Behind -- what you're saying is that you are striving for an ultimate goal. And what can that goal be but perfection?
NCLB's goal is that every student reach grade level proficiency in the subjects reading and math.
Congress passed the bill in late 2001, and Bush signed it in January 2002. Knowing that many students weren't proficient in reading and math at the time, they allowed some time to reach that goal -- a dozen years, until 2014.
Each school and district is measured each year on whether they are making Adequate Yearly Progress, AYP, toward that goal.
Now 10 of those 12 years have gone by, so the performance requirements are getting close to the 100 percent proficiency goal. For a district to meet AYP this year, 87 percent of its students must have passed the state reading/English language arts test, and 83 percent must have passed the math test. Ninety-five percent of students must have taken the tests, and depending on what grade level you're talking about, the district must have at least a 75 percent graduation rate or a 90 percent attendance rate.
The Obama administration has offered waivers on those requirements, but Texas hasn't asked for one. The law calls for sanctions against schools and districts that continually fail to meet AYP.
Obama also has sought to rewrite the law -- it was scheduled to be rewritten before he became president -- but Congress is far from agreeable.
School leaders say they're making progress, just not at the pace required by NCLB.
So we've got a law that has expired, with goals that less than a third of our school districts can reach, calling for penalties that no one wants to impose and a federal government that's constipated.
Given all that, AYP, and even NCLB, have lost much of their relevance. Rather than be angry at educators for getting bad marks, we're left with no choice but to depend on them to figure out what to do next.
Mike Norman is editorial director of the Star-Telegram / Arlington and Northeast Tarrant County.817-390-7830Twitter: @mnorman9
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