News Flash!

Spelling Discovers 1

The Secretary of Education has decided that a school that keeps missing one No Child Left Behind targets doesn't have to be treated as if it missed, say, 37 targets.

At least, not if that school is in one of 10 states participating in a pilot program Secretary Margaret Spellings announced recently. Other states must shut down or drastically change schools that persistently miss even one target, but the lucky 10 will not.

It's called "differentiated accountability."

"This is something good, something we’ve been advocating," commented NEA President Reg Weaver. But much more needs to be done, he added.

Spellings' new policy leaves intact the law's rigid reliance on test scores to measure school quality. And some observers point out that it treats urban schools with many minority and low-income children much more harshly than schools that are richer and whiter. In the Alice-in-Wonderland world of NCLB, schools that are wealthy and mostly White can pass with the same scores that would flunk an urban school.

That's because, if there are only a few English language learners, they don't have to meet the school-wide test score goal, but if there are a lot of ELLs, they do. And the same for other subgroups.

The idea of making schools accountable for the achievement of a subgroup only if the group has a certain minimum size was justified on the grounds that a small number of students might not be statistically representative, so the school shouldn't be responsible, but the achievement of a large group is more likely to represent school quality. If that were the real reason, though, the minimum group size would be the same across the country and it would be determined by a statistical test. Instead, every state was allowed to pick a different number -- clearly a political decision.

Urban schools generally have more members of many subgroups, so they have a higher hurdle to jump to reach the all-important "adequate yearly progress.

Here are some comments on the new program from NEA and from the Columbus Education Association.

--Alain Jehlen