Yet another of the Bush administration’s chickens has come home to roost, this
time in the arena of early education. The No Child Left Behind law has begun creating problems
for schools that are not unlike the balloon payments dogging many homeowners.
This past year, more schools failed to meet the federal law’s testing
requirements than ever before, in large part because, for many states, NCLB
required relatively small improvements in the first few years, followed by gigantic
leaps in the next few years.
In California,
for instance, many schools were making good progress, increasing test scores by
about 3 percent a year. But this year, these solid schools are required to up student
performance by a whopping 11 percent; for most of them, it has proven
impossible. One study estimated that every single elementary school in California would fail to
meet the NCLB requirements by 2014, the year in which the law aims to have
every American school achieve 100 percent proficiency in math and reading—a goal
which many experts have long argued is impossible.
“And they’re asking for another 11 percent increase next
year and the next, and that’s where I’m saying I just don’t know how,” said a California school
principal (pictured). “I’m spending sleepless nights.”
Perhaps most worrisome, NCLB (unintentionally) mandates harsher
punishments for schools in states with harder tests and higher academic
standards; schools with lower standards, on the other hand, stand a better chance
of meeting NCLB’s improvement requirements.
School administrators have been counting on Congress to
change the law to reflect more realistic standards of achievement. But with
war, environmental degradation, and economic disaster to contend with, it’s
unlikely that early education laws will be seriously revisited anytime soon.
Photo: New York Times
