Sun editorial:

The achievement gap

No Child Left Behind has not brought academic equity to the nation’s schools

Friday, May 1, 2009 | 2:08 a.m.

A federal report on student achievement brought good and bad news. The good: Minority students made dramatic gains on standardized tests over the past four decades. The bad: There has been little change in the achievement gap between white and minority students since the 1980s.

It is particularly notable that there was no reduction of the achievement gap from 2004 to last year, during the zenith of the No Child Left Behind Act. As the hallmark education policy of the Bush administration, the law was touted as a panacea for the nation’s education system, but it has failed to produce as promised.

“There’s not much indication that NCLB is causing the kind of change we were all hoping for,” testing expert G. Gage Kingsbury said in Tuesday’s New York Times. “Trends after the law took effect mimic trends we were seeing before. But in terms of watershed change, that doesn’t seem to be happening.”

The test results will frame a debate Congress is expected to have this year over reauthorizing the No Child Left Behind Act. Education Secretary Arne Duncan said the results show “we still have a lot more work to do.”

The law rigidly relies on standardized testing to gauge achievement, leading to an education system based on teaching to the test. As well, the law’s performance measures are convoluted and unrealistic.

President Barack Obama’s administration is planning to push for a new version of the law that would include tougher standards and more money to fund schools and education programs. The administration also wants to make sure highly qualified teachers are equally spread across poor and affluent schools.

Those would certainly be good additions to the law, but the No Child Left Behind Act requires more than a few modifications. More needs to be done to improve the education system and close the achievement gap. At minimum, Congress should completely overhaul the law before any more children are left behind.

Discussion: 9 comments so far…

By starrynite7

5/1/09 at 6:06 a.m.

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Maybe the parents of the children left behind should step up to the plate and actually make their children read at night, and or do their homework. No matter how many programs we have for children the bottom line falls to the parents.
If minority children are behind then the fault lies with the parents of minority children. They are failing their children and should do something about the problem.
White children have just as many obstacles as minority children. Maybe instead of spending extra money that we don't have on minority children falling way below standards in the classroom, we should make the parents pay for summer enrichment classes to bring their children up to par.
No more "PITY Parties" for minorities..time to step up to the plate and stop whining.
By Patrick_R_Gibbons

5/1/09 at 7:51 a.m.

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Star, its less a fault of the parents than it is of the school system. Minorities are disproportionally in bad schools and disproportionally taught by bad teachers.

Florida closed its achievement gap by instituting a series of reforms including ending social promotion in 3rd grade, remedial reading help, merit pay for teachers, charter schools, vouchers for students in failing schools, and scholarships for low-income children.

I wrote a report about it already and it compares Florida to Nevada over the last decade:
http://npri.org/docLib/20090318_Failure_...

Florida's gains have been so great that low-income Hispanics beat out the average of all Nevada's students on the NAEP reading exam.
By jpc

5/1/09 at 8:40 a.m.

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My school just got preliminary results of our CRT state tests for this year. We made significant progress from last year. By the way, last year we were already head and shoulders above the schools that surround us. We have had almost no staff turn over in the last 5 years and the staff is extremely dedicated.

This said, we will still ne labeled "Needs Improvement" and sanctioned because one of our subgroups (second language) didn't test high enough.

This is extremely frustrating. In the aggregate, our studetns are way, way, WAY higher than the district and state averages. Still, under NCLB we will be put on the naughty list and sanctioned. This is productive?
By neiman1

5/1/09 at 9:57 a.m.

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The act was not a magic cure all. It is simply a means for parents and the community to actually rate how their school is doing compared to the rest. Teacher's unions HATE any attempt to measure their ability.

The solution is to use the data from the tests and FIRE some teachers and replace them with others.
By rejco100

5/1/09 at 10:52 a.m.

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Sure has made a lot of NCLB personnel wealthy beyond belief!
By jpc

5/1/09 at 12:26 p.m.

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You know who got righ? Publishers like SRA McGraw Hill / Voyager Expanded Learning based in, guess where...Texas. These publishers were allowed unlimited influence in federal education policy as a reward for their support of Bush. Predictably, they crafted legislation that would require "needs improvement" schools to order programs from official lists populated mostly with their own products. Now the District pays upwards of $200 for ONE spiral bound Voyager teacher's manual, not to mention the consumables for students (they couldn't have just offered master copies for the teachers to reproduce on site - you gotta buy the workbook - again and again - every year).

These companies get rich at the expense of the district, studetns, and ultimately the taxpayers and no one pays attention or cares enough to say one word.
By Future

5/1/09 at 3:21 p.m.

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So Bush's education program is working and Obama wants to build on the lessons learned. What is wrong with that.

The LV Sun is complaining because as they say "A federal report on student achievement brought good ...news. The good: Minority students made dramatic gains on standardized tests over the past four decades.

This is not the kind of credit that the LV Sun wants Bush to get.
By lv_john_galt

5/1/09 at 6:23 p.m.

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NCLB has done some good things to get schools focused on subgroups that were historically ignored - special education, second-language learners, but to identify an entire school as needs improvement because of one small subgroup is unfair to the student body of that school. The labeling of schools should be modified to give parents a true sense of what is happening at a school.
By Harley

5/2/09 at 1:26 a.m.

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Since NCLB was enacted, Congress has increased federal funding of education, from $42.2 billion in 2001 to $54.4 billion in 2007.

No Child Left Behind received a 40.4% increase from $17.4 billion in 2001 to $24.4 billion.

The funding for reading quadrupled from $286 million in 2001 to $1.2 billion.

A 2008 study from the Department of Education, "Reading First Impact Study: Interim Report," analyzes the performance of students in 12 states who were in grades one to three during the 2004-5 and 2005-6 school years and concluded that the Reading First Program, a major billion dollar a year NCLB effort, had proven "ineffective."

The NCLB public program is a costly failure which Congress must STOP!