When the Republican Congress passed President Bush's No Child Left Behind act, there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth (and rightfully so) that forcing schools to meet artificial and perpetually harder standards, while adding another layer of bureacracy to the nation's education system, was a wrongheaded approach to the serious problems facing our schools. It seems that crafty state education departments, including Matt Blunt's team in Missouri, has found a crafty way around the NCLB.
Here it is: don't count the black kids' scores!!!
The
Associated Press reported today that officials with the Missouri Department of Education have been
purposefully ignoring the results of black and other minority students when assessing performance. The AP explains how states like Missouri have been gaming the system:
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 the requirements by using a loophole in the law that allows them to ignore scores of racial groups that are too small to be statistically significant.
State educators decide when a group is too small to count. 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 changes 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.
The AP conducted an analysis of the latest nationwide enrollment figures (2003-04) and compared that to the current racial category exemptions used by the various states. The results were extremely interesting:
Overall, AP found that about 1.9 million students -- or about one 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.
In Missouri, only 2,600 white students' tests were excluded, while
nearly 22,000 minority student tests were ignored.
The fact that the system was set up with procedures to allow the states to legally ignore the performance of minority students demonstrates yet again that George Bush and the Republicans in Congress do not care about minorities and that the law was nothing more than PR from a do-nothing President and his supporters in Congress. If they really wanted to improve schools, instead of passing meaningless legislation like NCLB, they would have increased funding for schools and forbidden regulators from ignoring test results from any student - black, brown or white.
The current system also demonstrates an inherent prejudiced assumption - that racial minorities are inferior students - and supports the ongoing and unacceptable problem of de facto segregation in our education system.