It’s 2010, only four years away from No Child Left Behind’s 2014 “Armageddon” year — when every child needs to be proficient in reading and math. There is gnashing of teeth in every state as target pass rates increase in the “subgroups” that cause most schools to fall short of their Annual Yearly Progress (AYP).
In Virginia, only 12 school divisions out of 132 met all benchmarks for the year, compared to 60 last year. That’s a drop to 20 percent of the previous year’s rate. Yet, despite this huge drop in benchmark success, most divisions saw their scores increase overall. What’s wrong with that picture?
The sad reality is that No Child Left Behind changes targets yearly, guaranteeing increasingly high numbers of “failures” the closer we get to 2014. We know that requiring 100 percent of anything is unrealistic, so to label a school district such as Arlington County’s — one of the best in the country, according to Newsweek’s list of top high schools — a “failure” because of the change in how pass rates for students with disabilities is calculated, points out why these statistics are almost useless.
Even the acknowledged best public high school in the country, Fairfax County’s Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, has to deal with perceived declines in test performance. Although the school has a 100 percent pass rate in every single Standards of Learning test administered to its students, the percentage of students who achieve “pass advanced” rather than “pass proficient” has declined in several areas including biology, chemistry, and earth science.
Should we scold the teachers and administrators for this decline in test scores? Of course not. Their scores are so high that variations from year to year are statistically insignificant and don’t illustrate anything about the quality of instruction. This is an extreme example, but the potential misuse of comparing yearly scores, especially since they are moving targets, is a reality for every school in the country. Speak to the principals of your local schools and they will say that judging their schools on the basis of the AYP is unfair.
We love oversimplified, black-and-white measures. We want people and fads to be in or out, and our schools to be pass or fail. We don’t have the attention spans to research subtle variations in scores or other factors that might contribute to a reliable school rating — including what courses are offered or the quality of extra-curricular activities.
Before No Child Left Behind, we had to do some research before passing judgment on our children’s schools. Now we let NCLB do it for us, to the detriment of all schools — even our best ones.
Of course, we should aim each year to encourage our students to do the best they can on every test they take, but that shouldn’t include an “improvement” graph that slopes upward relentlessly until it reaches 100 percent. Every teacher knows there are vagaries in student performance and test scores from year to year, and that the most telling indications of educational quality are often subtle and revealed over the long term. Unfortunately for schools and teachers, that wisdom doesn’t fit into our pass/fail culture. When Congress bought into that culture, every school was left behind.
