Cairo Association of Teachers - Newsletter

CAT Tracks for April 18, 2006 NCLB...LEAVING CHILDREN BEHIND

Scroll down past the original two stories (national and local) to read a follow-up story on the reaction of Congressional leaders to the AP story...

AP: States omit minorities' school scores

By FRANK BASS, NICOLE ZIEGLER DIZON and BEN FELLER
Associated Press Writers

States are helping public schools escape potential penalties by skirting the No Child Left Behind law's requirement that students of all races must show annual academic progress.

With the federal government's permission, schools aren't counting the test scores of nearly 2 million students when they report progress by racial groups, an Associated Press computer analysis found.

Minorities - who historically haven't fared as well as whites in testing - make up the vast majority of students whose scores are being excluded, AP found. And the numbers have been rising.

"I can't believe that my child is going through testing just like the person sitting next to him or her and she's not being counted," said Angela Smith, a single mother. Her daughter, Shunta' Winston, was among two dozen black students whose test scores weren't broken out by race at her suburban Kansas City, Mo., high school.

Under the law championed by President Bush, all public school students must be proficient in reading and math by 2014, although only children above second grade are required to be tested.

Schools receiving federal aid also must demonstrate annually that students in all racial categories are progressing or risk penalties that include extending the school year, changing curriculum or firing administrators and teachers.

The U.S. Education Department said it didn't know the breadth of schools' deliberate undercounting until seeing AP's findings. "Is it too many? You bet," Education Secretary Margaret Spellings said in an interview. "Are there things we need to do to look at that, batten down the hatches, make sure those kids are part of the system? You bet."

Students whose tests aren't being counted in required categories include Hispanics in California who don't speak English well, blacks in the Chicago suburbs, American Indians in the Northwest and special education students in Virginia, AP found.

Bush's home state of Texas - once cited as a model for the federal law - excludes scores for two entire groups. No test scores from Texas' 65,000 Asian students or from several thousand American Indian students are broken out by race. The same is true in Arkansas.

One consequence is that educators are creating a false picture of academic progress.

"The states aren't hiding the fact that they're gaming the system," said Dianne Piche, executive director of the Citizens' Commission on Civil Rights, a group that supports No Child Left Behind. "When you do the math ... you see that far from this law being too burdensome and too onerous, there are all sorts of loopholes."

The law signed by Bush in 2002 requires public schools to test more than 25 million students periodically in reading and math. No scores can be excluded from the overall measure.

But the schools also must report scores by categories, such as race, poverty, migrant status, English proficiency and special education. Failure in any category means the whole school fails.

States are helping schools get around that second requirement by using a loophole in the law that allows them to ignore scores of racial groups that are too small to be statistically significant.

Suppose, for example, that a school has 2,000 white students and nine Hispanics. In nearly every state, the Hispanic scores wouldn't be reported because there aren't enough to provide meaningful information.

State educators decide when a group is too small to count. And they've been asking the government for exemptions to exclude larger numbers of students in racial categories. Nearly two dozen states have successfully petitioned the government for such exemptions in the past two years. As a result, schools can now ignore racial breakdowns even when they have 30, 40 or even 50 students of a given race in the testing population.

Students must be tested annually in grades 3 through 8 and at least once in high school, usually in 10th grade. This is the first school year that students in all those grades must be tested, though schools have been reporting scores by race for the tests they have been administering since the law was approved.

To calculate a nationwide estimate, AP analyzed the 2003-04 enrollment figures the government collected - the latest on record - and applied the current racial category exemptions the states use.

Overall, AP found that about 1.9 million students - or about 1 in every 14 test scores - aren't being counted under the law's racial categories. Minorities are seven times as likely to have their scores excluded as whites, the analysis showed.

Less than 2 percent of white children's scores aren't being counted as a separate category. In contrast, Hispanics and blacks have roughly 10 percent of their scores excluded. More than one-third of Asian scores and nearly half of American Indian scores aren't broken out, AP found.

Ms. Smith's family in Missouri demonstrates how the exemptions work. Shunta' and other black children in tested grades at Oak Park High School, which is in a mostly white suburban Kansas City neighborhood, weren't counted as a group because Missouri schools have federal permission not to break out scores for any ethnic group with fewer than 30 students in the required testing population.

"Why don't they feel like she's important enough to rearrange things to make it count?" her mother asked.

In all, the tests of more than 24,000 mostly minority children in Missouri aren't being counted as groups, AP's review found. Other states have much higher numbers. California, for instance, isn't counting the scores of more than 400,000 children. In Texas, the total is about 257,000.

State educators defend the exemptions, saying minority students' performance is still being included in their schools' overall statistics even when they aren't being counted in racial categories.

Scott Palmer, a consultant for the Council of Chief State School Officers in Washington, said he hoped critics will focus on the 23 million children whose scores are being counted by schools rather than those whose scores aren't reported separately.

"There's a huge positive feeling for the notion" of making schools accountable, Palmer said. "It's a huge plus."

Spellings said she believes educators are acting in good faith. "Are there people out there who find ways to game the system? Of course," she said. "But on the whole ... I fully believe in my heart, mind and soul that educators are people of good will."

Bush has hailed the separate accounting of minority students as a vital feature of the law. "It's really essential we do that. It's really important," Bush said in a May 2004 speech. "If you don't do that, you're likely to leave people behind. And that's not right."

Nonetheless, Bush's Education Department continues to give widely varying exemptions to states:

-Oklahoma lets schools exclude the test scores from any racial category with 52 or fewer members in the testing population, one of the largest across-the-board exemptions. That means 1 in 5 children in the state don't have scores broken out by race.

-Maryland, which tests about 150,000 students more than Oklahoma, has an exempt group size of just five. That means fewer than 1 in 100 don't have scores counted.

-With one of the most diverse school populations in the nation, Florida has been allowed to create a special "provisional," or probationary, category for schools that are failing to meet the law's requirements. The deal helped reduce the number of failing Florida schools from 73 percent in 2003 to 37 percent in 2004.

-Washington state has made 18 changes to its testing plan, according to a February report by the Harvard Civil Rights Project. Vermont has made none. On average, states have made eight changes at either the state or federal level to their plans in the past five years, usually changing the size or accountability of subgroups whose scores were supposed to be counted.

Toia Jones, a black teacher whose daughters attend school in a mostly white Chicago suburb, said the loophole is enabling states and schools to avoid taking concrete measures to eliminate an "achievement gap" between white and minority students.

"With this loophole, it's almost like giving someone a trick bag to get out of a hole," she said. "Now people, instead of figuring out how do we really solve it, some districts, in order to save face or in order to not be faced with the sanctions, they're doing what they can to manipulate the data."

Some students feel left behind, too.

"It's terrible," said Michael Oshinaya, a senior at Eleanor Roosevelt High School in New York City who was among a group of black students whose scores weren't broken out as a racial category. "We're part of America. We make up America, too. We should be counted as part of America."

Spelling's Education Department is caught between two forces. Schools and states are eager to avoid the stigma of failure under the law, especially as the 2014 deadline draws closer. But Congress has shown little political will to modify the law to address their concerns. That leaves the racial category exemptions as a stopgap solution.

"She's inherited a disaster," said David Shreve, an education policy analyst for the National Conference of State Legislatures. "The 'Let's Make a Deal' policy is to save the law from fundamental changes, with Margaret Spellings as Monte Hall."

The solution may be to set a single federal standard for when minority students' scores don't have to be counted separately, said Ross Wiener, policy director for the Washington-based Education Trust.

The law originally created the exemptions to make sure schools didn't unfairly fail schools or compromise student privacy when they had just a small number of students in one racial category, Wiener said.

But there's little doubt now that group sizes have become political, said Wiener, whose group supports the law.

"They're asking the question, not how do we generate statistically reliable results, but how do we generate politically palatable results," he said.

---

Associated Press Writers Laura Wides-Munoz in Miami, Nahal Toosi in New York and Garance Burke in Kansas City contributed to this report.

Local focus from the Southeast Missourian...

No Child Left Behind local story

MARK BLISS ~ Southeast Missourian

Missouri's Department of Elementary and Secondary Education excluded test scores of 385 students, most of them minorities, in 19 Southeast Missouri school districts in the 2003-2004 academic year in determining whether those schools made adequate yearly progress under the federal No Child Left Behind Act.

But with the federal government's approval, schools aren't counting the test scores of nearly 2 million students nationwide when they report progress by racial groups, an Associated Press computer analysis found.

Education officials in each state have decided when a group is too small to count. As a result, schools can now ignore racial breakdowns even when they have 30, 40 or even 50 students of a given race in the testing population.

In Missouri, the tests of more than 24,000 minority students aren't being counted as groups. Missouri schools have federal permission not to break out scores for any ethnic group with fewer than 30 students in the testing population.

Franklin Elementary School in Cape Girardeau removed 29 black and four Hispanic students' test scores from racial and ethnic subgroups. In all, the school excluded 34 percent of 97 third- and fourth-graders tested.

Under the federal law, schools and subgroups of students within each school must meet proficiency benchmarks on math and communication arts standardized tests in order to avoid penalties such as paying for students to transfer to better performing schools within a district.

A school's student body as a whole can meet academic standards, but the school can fail to make the grade as a result of poor test scores by a subgroup of students.

Franklin principal Rhonda Dunham said schools not counting certain scores aren't trying to ignore the academic needs of minority students. She said school district administrators and principals look at every test score, even the ones excluded in terms of adequate yearly progress.

"You can't exclude any of them because you want them all to be successful," Dunham said.

In the Kansas City area, the data show Hispanic children's scores at nearly 60 percent of the schools weren't separately evaluated while black students' performance wasn't broken out at nearly a quarter of the schools.

Dozens of groups, including the National School Boards Association and the NAACP, are lobbying Congress to close the federal law's loopholes. They charge that the exemptions allow school districts to disregard subgroup scores of minority and special needs students.

"This is an unethical means for masking the true needs of minority children by hiding the state's poor test scores," said Nicole Francis-Williams, the interim national director of education at the NAACP office in Washington, D.C.

No Child Left Behind has created an almost impossible situation, said Dr. Bert Schulte, deputy commissioner at the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education.

"Not counting the scores because there's 29 students is neglectful, but counting a subgroup that is too small to be a reliable measure is questionable as well."

DESE spokesman Jim Morris said, there are valuable statistical reasons to have some minimum group size. Schools, he said, don't want to be punished for the poor test scores of a few students.

In the past, students weren't tested every year in math and communication arts. This spring schools are starting annual tests for students in third through eighth grades.

That means many more students are going to be tested and more schools should have subgroups larger than 30 students, Morris said.

"I think it increases the likelihood that more schools will be held accountable this year for more subgroups."

At the Jackson Middle School, 24 students' Missouri Assessment Program test scores weren't included in adequate-yearly-progress calculations. The excluded groups included 15 black students, five Hispanic and four Asian students.

Combined, they accounted for 3.2 percent of the students tested at the middle school.

Sam Duncan, who helps coordinate MAP testing for the Jackson School District, said school districts simply are following orders from state education officials. "We never made any of the rules," he said.

But Duncan said the school district wants to improve all students' test scores.

The follow-up story from CNN.com...

Congress promises scrutiny of test scores

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Congressional leaders and a former Bush Cabinet member said Tuesday that schools should stop excluding large numbers of minority students' test scores when they report progress under the No Child Left Behind law.

The Associated Press reported Monday that schools have gotten federal permission to deliberately not count the test scores of nearly 2 million students when they report academic progress by race as required by the law. The scores excluded were overwhelmingly from minorities, the AP found.

Some leaders said Congress may need to intervene. The Education Department and others owe the public an explanation, said the Republican House Education Committee chairman's office.

"All stakeholders involved in the discussion should be willing to step forward and explain to parents and taxpayers why they have asked for special accommodations," said Steve Forde, spokesman for committee chairman Howard McKeon, R-California.

The reaction came as President Bush, visiting a school in Rockville, Maryland, said his signature education law is helping to identify struggling children early on. He singled out the importance of closing a test-score gap between white and minority children but did not mention excluded scores.

Lawmakers who helped pass the law in 2001 said the system that lets states get exemptions to exclude large numbers of test scores from the required racial categories must be addressed.

"If states are simply gaming the system and harming students' chances for a better education, they must not be allowed to continue to do that -- period," said Rep. George Miller, D-California, a sponsor of the law.

Miller, the top Democrat on the House Education Committee, said he would ask Education Secretary Margaret Spellings how she plans to correct the problems.

Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Massachusetts, another backer of the law, said test scores should only be excluded if the reliability of the data is in question. He said the Bush administration should be making sure of that -- or Congress might step in.

Sen. Mike Enzi of Wyoming, the Republican Senate Education Committee chairman, said the way student data are used would be closely examined when the law is reauthorized next year.

Former Bush administration Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson, who now serves on a private commission studying the law, and commission co-chairman Roy Barnes issued a joint statement calling the AP's findings alarming.

"If the goal of the No Child Left Behind Act is to ensure that all children meet state standards, then allowing large numbers of the most disadvantaged children to fall between the cracks is unacceptable," said Thompson and Barnes.