Not far enough

Sunday, March 23, 2008 | 2:07 a.m.

The Bush administration has announced it will ease the requirements of its No Child Left Behind law for a handful of states in a pilot project that officials say should help reverse a weakness in the law that has resulted in 10 percent of the nation’s schools being classified as failing.

Last week Education Secretary Margaret Spellings said her department will give up to 10 states the leeway to concentrate on improving schools that are struggling the most while focusing less on schools that are raising standardized test scores for all but one group of students, The New York Times reports.

Under the No Child Left Behind law that President Bush signed in 2002, all students are to be proficient in math and reading by 2014. Schools have to demonstrate specified incremental improvements in standardized test scores across all segments of their student populations — even among groups of students who have learning disabilities or don’t speak English.

As a result, about 9,000 of the nation’s 90,000 public schools have been deemed as failing, which means they could face sanctions that include cuts in federal funding or even closure, the Times said.

Under the pilot program, schools that have missed target scores for only one demographic group of students will not face sanctions, allowing states to focus on improving the schools in which significant numbers of students are failing.

To qualify for the program, states must have untarnished records of following the No Child Left Behind law. Nevada’s standardized assessment method remains under federal scrutiny until next year, so it does not qualify.

The plan illustrates that even the Bush administration has been forced to acknowledge the stunning failure of this law, which has made standardized test scores more important than educating children to be well-rounded critical thinkers.

While the pilot program can be viewed as a small step in the right direction, we think it is too small. This reform should be extended to all of the nation’s public schools as a first step toward repealing what is a bad law.