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No Child Left Behind changes target poor, minority grad rates

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Education Secretary Margaret Spellings announced changes in the federal No Child Left Behind legislation that place new responsibilities on public schools for the numbers of students they graduate.

Like much of No Child Left Behind, the goal is positive but the method is lacking. Some of the changes, Spellings said, are intended to increase the number of students, specifically minority students, who graduate from high school.

The federal legislation is up for reauthorization in Congress, but efforts to change it have not moved forward. Politicians and interest groups have not come to agreement on how to improve the complex maze of targets, assessments and sanctions that relies largely on standardized testing and attendance rates.

Spellings announced earlier this week that by the end of the 2012-13 school year, all states would need to use the same method for calculating and reporting graduation rates. The method, according to a report in Education Week, would be the approach states' governors agreed to in 2005.

We believe it is important for all states to calculate graduation rates using the same approach — otherwise comparisons among states are useless.

This good idea, however, is severely dampened by other requirements. Instead of learning from existing weaknesses in No Child Left Behind, the new rules repeat the same mistake of ignoring reality on the ground and confusing following rules with student achievement.

Public schools must specifically address the disproportionate numbers of minority students who drop out.

Schools, districts and states would have to show "continuous and substantial improvement" from one year to the next, beginning no later than 2012-13.

Again, a good goal. Under the existing No Child Left Behind law, schools must track graduation rates overall — the requirements would break the graduating class down into subgroups by gender, race and ethnicity, and special education status.

A failure of any one of these subgroups to show enough improvement would result in the entire school being designated as failing to make "adequate yearly progress" and facing penalties.

Under existing law, schools that don't have enough of one subgroup taking the standardized test are cited for failing to make adequate yearly progress. Catalina Foothills High School experienced this when too few students with learning disabilities were counted as taking the test — so the entire school failed to make adequate yearly progress.

Tracking subgroups of kids can reveal problems masked by aggregate figures for an entire class.

But these figures aren't useful without assistance to address the problem.

The approach ignores the reality many schools face: Urban schools with large numbers of minority students often serve neighborhoods where students must work to contribute to the family income; where crime rates are higher than in the suburbs; where communities do not have the same ability as wealthier neighborhoods to raise money through donations or property taxes to improve school facilities and programs.

Such realities do not prohibit student success, but they make it more difficult and they must be addressed.

Pointing out problems and levying punishments without helping to fix underlying problems doesn't improve public education.