Five years ago, when the federal No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) began ratcheting up education accountability standards, the pinch was first felt mainly in inner-city areas where the massive failures of public schools are most evident. Now affluent suburban school systems are coming under pressure and they don’t like it one bit.
Nationwide, 20 percent of all public school districts failed to make adequate yearly progress last year, including more than a third of northern Virginia’s widely hailed schools. The results aren’t much better in Maryland where 56 schools in Prince George’s County and 17 in Montgomery County failed for the second year in a row, leaving them subject to sanctions intended to help parents rescue their children from failing schools.
These dismal results illuminate the real story behind efforts earlier this year by local school boards in Virginia to be excused from NCLB rules requiring that all students take the same proficiency tests in reading and math. The tests set an essential benchmark against which all future efforts will be measured. Without the benchmark, progress can’t be measured. The local boards backed down only when the feds threatened to withhold millions in federal funding.
Something is terribly wrong with public education when, despite spending more child than has ever before been spent in human history, anywhere from a quarter to half of the students in a school can’t pass basic read and math tests. The unions that control public schools often blame the tests themselves, but these diagnostic tools were chosen by each state, not the federal government. What the unions most fear is that NCLB will provide undeniable objective proof that they — not the tests, not student or parent demographics, not even President Bush — are responsible for the scandal of American public schools.
The unionsprefer subjective criteria to measure academic performance because the results are so easily manipulatable, especially to gullible parents. But such obfuscation long ago ceased being merely tiresome.
Third-graders shouldn’t be expected to read Shakespeare or do trigonometry, but graduating seniors ought to be able to read at a third-grade level and solve third-grade math problems. That achieving such minimal proficiency has become so Herculean a task is a sad testament to the diminished state of public education in America.
