The controversial No Child Left Behind Act is due to expire this year, and as Congress works on renewing it, U.S. Sen. Lisa Murkowski wants to fix one of the law’s more glaring problems. No Child Left Behind uses an unfair and unhelpful way to judge how well schools educate children.
Under the law, schools are not judged by what kind of academic progress individual students make while they are at the school. Instead, schools are judged on a very limited snapshot: Do X percent of students who happen to attend the school on testing day get “proficient” scores in math and English?
The ratings take no account of how long a school or a school district has had to educate the student. The student who recently transferred is treated the same as one who has been there since starting kindergarten. Progress is measured by how test scores for this year’s students in a particular grade compare to the previous year’s students in that same grade.
That doesn’t make a lot of sense. It’s a snapshot that compares two totally different groups of students in two different years.
What should matter is whether students are making adequate academic progress as they are educated by a particular school or school district.
That’s called a growth model, and that’s what Sen. Murkowski wants to see included in an updated No Child Left Behind Act. Alaska is one of a handful of states that got special federal permission to include growth of test scores as a school rating factor. Sen. Murkowski wants to make sure the option is in place for all states. In talking to the Fairbanks News-Miner last month, she said she won’t support a bill that doesn’t allow growth models.
Growth models are allowed in a draft No Child Left Behind bill being considered in the U.S. House Education Committee. The draft lets states be more flexible in how they rate schools probably too flexible. The House measure has drawn fire for allowing other ways of rating school progress besides student test scores, such as graduation rates or college enrollment. The critics are right to worry about alternative ratings that would relieve the pressure to ensure that all students are learning the basics.
