Back to Leave No Child Behind

Here you go C.I.

NCLB Pumping Gas into a Flooded Engine?
2005 report on funding - budget and state by state
http://www.house.gov/ed_workforce/issues/108th/education/nclb/nclbfundingreport.pdf

NO CHILD LEFT BEHIND
Implementation Station
As a result of the No Child Left Behind Act, the federal government today is spending more money on elementary and secondary (K-12) education than at any other time in the history of the United States. Federal K-12 education funding to states and local schools has increased by an historic $6.9 billion (from $17.4 billion in FY 2001, the final Clinton budget, to $24.3 billion in FY 2004) since the hallmark education reform legislation was signed into law.

Title I aid for disadvantaged students, the cornerstone of the No Child Left Behind Act, has increased by 41% since 2001, to $12.3 billion for FY 2004.
In fact, Title I funding received a larger combined increase during the first two years of President Bush''s administration than it received in the previous seven combined under President Clinton.

Despite the twin challenges of war and economic uncertainty, President Bush and Congress have expanded funding for all of America ''s education priorities. Research and opinion polls consistently show Americans believe the most important factor in improving America ''s schools is high standards and accountability for results - not spending. Republicans in Congress, under the leadership of President Bush, have provided both the resources and the reforms Americans want for education.
http://edworkforce.house.gov/issues/108th/education/nclb/funding.htm

Riverdeep Announces Successful Reading, Math Program in Ohio That Draws Increased NCLB Funding
Business Wire; 10/7/2004
SAN FRANCISCO & CANTON, Ohio -- Destination Success(TM) Expands to Ten Schools after Helping to Turn Things around at a Failing School
More schools in Canton, Ohio have received No Child Left Behind Funding to adopt an innovative approach to reading and math instruction, after one elementary school went from having the worst performance in the district to having the best -- in the course of one year.
Fairmount Elementary School went from a 38% pass rate on the state's fourth-grade reading test to 83% passing after adopting an intensive instructional model that featured ...
http://www.highbeam.com/library/doc0.asp?docid=1G1:122925977&refid=ink_tptd_np&skeyword=&teaser=

HISTORIC EXPENDITURES FROM NCLB FUNDING SOURCES
http://www.state.sd.us/legislativeaudit/NCLB/Chapter%203%20historical%20expenditures.pdf

Education Funding: Setting the Record Straight on Education Spending Myths
January 2005

Excerpt


Simply spending more money is not the answer to the problems facing America ''s schools. High standards, accountability for results, and increased parental involvement are all essential to improving education and ensuring no child in America is left behind.

Research and opinion polls consistently show Americans believe the most important factors in improving America ''s schools are high standards and accountability for results -- not spending. Republicans in Congress have provided both the resources and the reforms Americans want to improve education. More than ever is being spent -- and more than ever is being expected.

Since Republicans took control of the House in 1995, federal education funding has increased significantly. Funding for the U.S. Department of Education has increased by nearly 150 percent from $23 billion in FY 1996 to $57 billion in FY 2005.

In fact, government data suggests federal education funding has increased more quickly than states can spend the money, with states sitting on billions in unspent No Child Left Behind (NCLB) and special education funds. As of November 12, 2004, states were collectively sitting on $8 billion in federal education funding, with sixty-seven percent of these unspent funds designated for federal school improvement, special education, Title I, and other programs for economically disadvantaged students. Nearly $350 million of these unspent education dollars were appropriated during the final years of the Clinton Administration (FY 2000, FY 2001) -- before NCLB was enacted into law.

No Child Left Behind. States and local school districts are expected to receive $24.4 billion in federal funds in FY 2005 to help implement the No Child Left Behind Act, accounting for a forty percent increase in federal elementary and secondary education funding since President Bush signed NCLB into law.

Title I aid for disadvantaged students. Title I aid for disadvantaged students, the cornerstone of NCLB, has increased more during the first two years of President George W. Bush''s administration alone than it did during the previous eight years combined under President Bill Clinton. In FY 2005, Title I received $12.7 billion, an increase of forty-five percent since NCLB was signed into law.

Special education. The federal government is not yet paying its fair share of the cost of special education as required by the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA). Fresh off of three consecutive increases in IDEA funding under President Bush, special education grants are funded at $11.4 billion in FY 2005, representing the highest level in history and over three times the amount provided in 1995. Throughout the Clinton Administration, Republicans in Congress routinely provided more money for special education than President Clinton requested.

Teacher quality. When President Bush signed NCLB into law in 2002, it signified a 38 percent increase in federal funding for teacher quality -- an increase of $787 million over President Clinton''s last budget. In FY 2005, states are provided $2.91 billion for professional development programs to provide states and school districts with tools to improve teacher quality, in addition to $179 million to increase the number of teachers trained in the fields of math and science.

Head Start. In FY 2005, funding for Head Start is increased to $6.9 billion, allowing Head Start to maintain current services while ensuring that quality improvements and training elements are fully implemented.

Pell Grants. The maximum Pell Grant award is funded at $4,050 in FY 2005. In recent years, Republicans in Congress, later working with President Bush, have increased the maximum Pell Grant award by sixty-four percent -- from $2,470 in FY 1996 to $4,050 in FY 2005.

Reading First. Funding for the Reading First and Early Reading First programs are increased to $1.15 billion in FY 2005, enabling states to ensure all children can read by the time they reach the third grade through scientific research-based reading programs.

State Assessments. States are provided $412 million to help cover the costs of developing annual reading and math assessments in FY 2005.

Charter Schools. In FY 2005, states are provided $217 million for charter school grants and $37 million to help enhance charter school facilities.
T
RIO and GEAR UP. Funding to help minority and disadvantaged students prepare for and succeed in college is increased to $837 million and $306 million, respectively, in FY 2005.

Democrat leaders and their allies continue to charge that proposed and enacted appropriation levels for the No Child Left Behind Act provided less funding than ""authorized"" under the law. However, when they were in control of the White House and Congress, Democrats used the same approach to fund education in 1994, the last time the Elementary & Secondary Education Act (ESEA) was reauthorized -- yet not a single Democrat leader accused President Clinton or then-Majority Leader Gephardt of providing ""less than promised"" for education. The total authorization level for the Improving America's Schools Act of 1994 (IASA) for FY1995 was $13 billion. However, IASA activities were appropriated at $10.3 billion for FY1995 -- a discrepancy of $2.7 billion. Yet not a single Democrat accused President Clinton of ""underfunding"" elementary and secondary education by $2.7 billion.

The House Democratic leadership''s budget for FY 2005 provided billions less for the Title I program for disadvantaged students than the NCLB law technically authorized, even as leaders of the minority criticized President Bush for funding education programs in that manner.

The nonpartisan Government Accountability Office (GAO) released a report in May 2004 discrediting claims that the No Child Left Behind Act is an ""unfunded mandate."" The GAO reviewed more than 500 different statutes and regulations enacted in 2001 and 2002, including Congressional Budget Office (CBO) reports about NCLB, and officially concluded NCLB is not an unfunded mandate. According to the report, NCLB ""did not meet the UMRA''s [Unfunded Mandates Reform Act of 1995] definition of a mandate because the requirements were a condition of federal financial assistance"" and ""any costs incurred by state, local or tribal governments would result from complying"" with conditions of receiving the federal funds.

A report by The Josiah Bartlett Center for Public Policy (www.jbartlett.org) estimated that NCLB would be a financial boon for New Hampshire . The study estimated the costs associated with complying with NCLB -- providing highly qualified teachers and paraprofessionals, new testing requirements, technology plans, and special education -- to be approximately $7.7 million. Factoring in the $13.7 million in increased federal education aid coming from NCLB, the study concluded that New Hampshire would receive an extra $6 million in federal education aid to spend on other state and local education priorities in 2003.

A major national cost study released by AccountabilityWorks in February 2004, a non-profit research organization, showed that states are profiting handsomely from the education spending increases triggered by NCLB. The authors'' analysis estimated states would collectively receive a surplus of $787 million in federal No Child Left Behind funding for the 2004-05 school year, a surplus that could increase to $5 billion by the 2007-08 school year. The report also recognized states are under no obligation to accept the federal education funds that accompany the No Child Left Behind requirements, and cautioned against attempts to attribute costs to NCLB that the law does not impose.

Results from another report, published in the Spring 2004 edition of the policy journal Education Next by two Massachusetts state officials (state board of education chairman James Peyser and state chief economist Robert Costrell), concluded the federal government ""overshot the target"" in terms of funding NCLB by providing more money than some states need to make it work. Total federal spending for K-12 education grew significantly from 2001 to 2003 as a result of No Child Left Behind, Peyser and Costrell noted, resulting in an $8 billion funding increase that is sufficient -- if not more than sufficient -- to allow states to meet NCLB''s current expectations.
http://edworkforce.house.gov/issues/109th/education/funding/fundingmyths.htm

Democrat Leadership Budget Doesn't "Fully Fund" No Child Left Behind
UPDATED: October 7, 2004
Democrat leaders in the U.S. House of Representatives -- who have criticized President Bush and congressional Republicans for proposing budgets that would spend less money than technically authorized for the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) education reform law -- have offered a budget of their own that would do precisely the same thing, providing billions less for the Title I program than the NCLB law authorized.

Democrats have repeatedly suggested that if they were in charge of Congress and the White House, their budgets would "fully fund" No Child Left Behind and other education priorities. But now that they've been forced to explain how they would pay for everything they claim to stand for, Democrats can't deliver.

Republicans have long noted that the authorized spending levels in NCLB are spending caps -- not spending "promises." If the authorized spending levels in the No Child Left Behind Act truly are 'promises,' as Democrats claim, why are Democrats offering budget proposals that spend less money than the law authorized?

The budget offered by House Democrat leaders as an alternative to the Republican budget resolution for FY 2005 would provide a maximum of $15.4 billion in funding for No Child Left Behind's Title I program - $5.1 billion less than the $20.5 billion cap technically authorized. [Under President Bush, annual Title I appropriations have jumped from $8.8 billion under President Clinton to a proposed $13.3 billion under President Bush's proposed FY 2005 budget. Title I received a larger increase during the first two years of the Bush administration than it did during the previous eight years combined under Clinton .]

The Title I increase provided in the Democrat leadership budget is far smaller than the increase Democrats have previously claimed is needed to implement NCLB -- and in order to meet the $15.4 billion figure for Title I, Democrats would have to provide no further increases for other education priorities such as special education, reading, teachers, or higher education.

What President Bush and Congress promised in NCLB was that federal education spending would increase dramatically and be tied for the first time ever to accountability for results. That is exactly what has happened.

The Democrat leadership budget is further proof Democrats don't really believe authorization levels mean as much as they say they mean. The Democrats' attacks on President Bush's education budgets are merely political.
MORE FACTS DEMOCRAT LEADERS DON''T WANT YOU TO KNOW

When Democrats were in the majority in Congress, they did not consider authorization levels to mean "promises." Case in point: the federal education law prior to NCLB, passed in 1994 by a Democrat Congress and White House, authorized spending of up to $13 billion on Title I, but Democrats appropriated just $10.3 billion to implement it. Not a single Democrat accused President Clinton of failing to provide adequate funding for education.

Senator John Kerry's own state of Massachusetts has analyzed NCLB's costs and found the law is adequately funded -- and possibly overfunded in some states. A report published in the February 2004 edition of the policy journal Education Next by two Massachusetts state officials (state board of education chairman James Peyser and economist Robert Costrell) concluded the federal government "overshot the target" in terms of funding the law, providing more money than some states need to make it work. (http://www.educationnext.org/20042/22.html)

Republicans appropriated more than Clinton requested for special education. Similarly, during the 1990s, Republican Congresses consistently appropriated more money for IDEA than requested by Democrat President Clinton, but not a single Democrat accused President Clinton of underfunding special education.

Major media outlets, including the Los Angeles Times, have recently blown the whistle on the NEA for making inaccurate claims about the authorized funding levels in the NCLB law. On January 28, 2004, after initially accepting the NEA's inaccurate claim that the NCLB Act "authorized $32 billion in funding for 2004," the Times ran a correction rejecting the NEA assertion and noting that the law does not authorize or promise a specific amount in funding for 2004. In 2003, the New York Times printed a similar correction after initially accepting reform opponents' false claims about NCLB's funding levels.

DEMOCRAT RHETORIC ON EDUCATION DOESN''T MATCH DEMOCRAT ACTIONDemocrat leaders have repeatedly characterized the authorized spending levels in NCLB as "promises" and claimed any budget that provides less than authorized would leave children behind. Recent examples:

In a February 2, 2004 summary attacking the President's FY 2005 budget, House Democrats characterized the $20.5 billion spending cap authorized for Title I under NCLB for 2005 as a "promise" and said providing less would constitute a broken promise. "President Bush shortchanges his own No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) by $9.4 billion?-?-including $7.2 billion for Title I. The President breaks his promise to provide $20.5 billion for Title I under NCLB. His Budget will deny nearly 5 million disadvantaged children critical education services, such as extra help to become proficient in reading and math." http://edworkforce.house.gov/democrats/bushbudgetFY05.pdf

In July 2003, House Democrats said that if they were in charge, their budget would "fully fund" NCLB. Virtually all House Democrats last year voted in favor of an NEA-backed amendment to the Labor-HHS-Education appropriations bill that would have suspended the bipartisan NCLB reforms indefinitely until "full funding" was provided. Democrats clearly led the press to believe that if they were in charge of Congress, they would have provided "full funding" -- but the budget they offered March 24 falls billions short of that boast. A July 10, 2004 "dear colleague" letter from Chairman Boehner exposing the falsehoods behind this amendment is available online at http://edworkforce.house.gov/issues/108th/education/nclb/dc071003.htm.

A fact sheet distributed by House Democrat leaders on February 9, 2004 equated the authorized spending levels in NCLB with "promises" and said providing less would leave millions of children behind. "While President Bush is highlighting the additional $1 billion he invested education in his 2005 budget, he still provides $9.4 billion less for education than was promised in the No Child Left Behind Act -- meaning that 2.4 million children will not get the help with reading and math they were promised under Title I," the fact sheet read. http://www.housedemocrats.gov/news/librarydetail.cfm?library_content_id=145&levelid=301&LibraryContentType=6

Senate and House Democrats have said providing less than technically authorized "breaks the promise of better schools for all children." In a January 8, 2004 letter to Secretary Rod Paige, top Democrats -- including Rep. George Miller and Sens. Kennedy, Edwards, Harkin, and Clinton -- all characterized the Title I authorization levels in NCLB as a "promise" and suggested providing any less than technically authorized under the cap would leave children behind. "The pending Fiscal Year 2004 budget underfunds the Act by $7.5 billion, including underfunding the critical Title I program by over $6 billion. Almost 5 million children are left behind, even though they are fully capable of learning to high standards. The underfunding of the Act breaks the promise of better schools for all children and undermines support for the reforms we agreed upon in the Act to improve public education." http://edworkforce.house.gov/democrats/paigenclbletter.html

Democrat leaders attacked President Bush just weeks ago for providing less money than technically authorized. "The budget request continues to renege on the commitment to fully fund the No Child Left Behind Act - falling $9.4 billion short for this coming fiscal year and $27 billion short overall since the law's first year," charged a press release from Rep. George Miller (D-CA) on February 11, 2004, previewing Mr. Miller's testimony before the House Budget Committee.
http://edworkforce.house.gov/issues/108th/education/nclb/factsheet032504.htm

President Bush's Proposed FY 2006 Federal Budget for Education

In his budget request to Congress for fiscal year 2006, President Bush has proposed a $2.57 trillion budget that would either freeze or reduce spending for many domestic programs and employ a five-year plan for deficit reduction. The budget proposes 48 "program terminations" that affect education, totaling $4.3 billion, including $2.2 billion for high school programs such as vocational education.

The following information highlights key areas of the Department of Education's proposed budget of $56 billion along with background information for each area.

Title I Grants to Schools
FY 2005 Funding: $12.7 Billion
FY 2006 Proposal: $13.3 Billion
As the largest source of funding for implementing the requirements of the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), Title I grants would receive a 4.7 percent increase of $603 million over the current level of funding (approximately $12.7 billion). However, the Title I shortfall would increase by more than $9 billion in comparison to the amount of funding that Congress authorized for FY 2006 when passing the No Child Left Behind Act in 2002: According to NCLB, $22.75 billion is supposed to be appropriated for Title I grants to local education authorities next year. Over a five-year period, the cumulative funding shortfall for Title I since enactment of NCLB would rise to $30.8 billion.

Special Education Grants (IDEA)
FY 2005 Funding: $10.6 Billion
FY 2006 Proposal: $11.1 Billion
Funding for special education grants to states under the Individuals With Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) would increase by $508 million, or by 4.8 percent over the current level. However, the $11.1 billion proposed is less than half (roughly 19 percent) of the level of funding Congress initially promised when passing IDEA in 1975, which was 40 percent of the cost per student in special education programs.
Furthermore, the $11.1 billion proposed is $3.5 billion less than the amount authorized for FY 2006 in the recent "Individuals With Disabilities Education Improvement Act," Public Law N 108-446. Under the new law, the level of funding for IDEA is authorized at $14.6 billion for FY 2006.

The President's budget proposal states that with the $508 million increase requested and the recent reauthorization of IDEA, states and local school districts will have more flexibility in areas such as early intervention services, supplemental education services, and paperwork reduction in certain states.

High School Reform - Expansion of NCLB
The President is requesting $1.5 billion for high school reforms, of which $1.2 billion would fund a proposed High School Intervention Initiative. $250 million is proposed to measure student performance in reading/language arts and math in high school; and $200 million is proposed for the Striving Readers program to improve the reading skills of teenage students.

As a result of this initiative, funding for other programs would be consolidated, reduced or eliminated, impacting Vocational Education, Upward Bound, Smaller Learning Communities, Even Start literacy grants, Safe and Drug Free Schools State Grants, education technology grants, and others.

Title V - State Grants for Innovative Programs
FY 2005 Funding: $198.4 million
FY 2006 Proposal: $100 Million
The budget request for Title V programs is $100 million, which would be a $98.4 million decrease from FY 2005. The Administration stated that, "The reduced request reflects a decision to redirect funding to higher-priority activities that are better targeted to national needs and have stronger accountability mechanisms."

Title V funding is beneficial to school districts because it provides flexible funding for locally driven initiatives such as class-size reduction, supplemental educational services, and professional development. NSBA opposed budget cuts to the program last year, and is opposed to reducing this flexible source of funding to school districts for FY 2006.

Teacher Incentive Fund/Teacher Quality Grants
Along with the President's high school reform initiative, the proposed Teacher Incentive Fund of $500 million would be a new program "designed to stimulate close alignment of teacher compensation systems with better teaching, higher student achievement, and high-need schools."

The fund would provide $450 million in state formula grants "to reward effective teachers and to offer incentives for highly qualified teachers to teach in high-poverty schools." The remaining $50 million would "fund competitive grants to State education agencies, local education authorities, and non-profit organizations for the design and implementation of performance-based compensation systems to develop effective models that other districts could adopt to improve teacher compensation systems."

The $500 million proposed for teacher incentives would be provided in addition to funding for Title II - Improving Teacher Quality State Grants, which would receive $2.9 billion -- the same amount of funding appropriated for FY 2005.

Conversely, budget allocations for Teacher Quality Enhancement are proposed for elimination. The budget request states that all of the activities allowable under this program can be carried our under other existing federal programs. Teacher quality enhancement funds ($68.3 million) are used to improve recruitment, preparation, licensure and support for teachers.

Choice Incentive Fund
The proposed budget requests $50 million for a "Choice Incentive Fund" that would provide competitive grants to states, school districts or nonprofit organizations that provide parents with opportunities to transfer their children to "higher-performing" public, private or charter schools.

The President has requested between $50 million and $75 million for this idea every year he's been in office, and Congress has never agreed to it. Especially considering the austere budget proposed for important and mandated federal education programs, any plan to divert even a single penny of taxpayer money for private school vouchers should be a non-starter.

Education Technology State Grants
FY 2005 Funding: $496 million
FY 2006 Proposal: $0
The Administration is proposing the termination of Education Technology State Grants next year, stating that, "there is no longer a significant need for a state formula grant program targeted specifically on (and limited to) the effective integration of technology into schools and classrooms." Last month, however, the Department of Education concluded in its National Education Technology Plan that, "Technology ignites opportunities for learning, engages today's students as active learners and participants in decision-making on their own educational futures and prepares our nation for the demands of a global society in the 21st Century. Instead of providing a dedicated budget allocation for Education Technology State Grants, the Department of Education's budget summary notes that, "Districts seeking funds to integrate technology into teaching and learning can use other federal program funds such as Improving Teacher Quality State Grants and Title I Grants to local educational agencies." As noted above, Title I grants would be underfunded by more than $9 billion under the FY 2006 budget proposal.

FY 2006 Program Terminations
The list of programs proposed for elimination in the FY 2006 budget request to Congress is attached along with the current amount of funding for each program. During a February 7 budget briefing, U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings noted that among the 48 program terminations proposed, 15 programs currently receive $5 million or less in funding. Spellings added that the funding for these programs would be "redirected to implement No Child Left Behind."

Programs proposed for elimination include:

Comprehensive School Reform $205.3 million
Education Technology State Grants $496 million
Even Start $225.1 million
Safe and Drug Free Schools Grants $437.4 million
School Dropout Prevention $4.9 million
Smaller Learning Communities $94.5 million
Teacher Quality Enhancement $68.3 million
Vocational Education State Grants $1.19 billion

Education and Human Resources in the FY 2006 Budget

Watson Scott Swail, Educational Policy Institute;
Daryl E. Chubin, Shirley M. Malcom,
and Kathryn Grogan, AAAS

Introduction

In 2004, the President offered a FY 2005 budget that padded education and other discretionary programs. This, year, the Administration has reversed stride by making significant cuts to traditionally untouchable programs, sparking significant debate on Capitol Hill. The President has requested $56 billion in discretionary appropriations for the Department of Education (ED), a reduction of $530 million from FY 2005 and the first proposed decrease (1 percent) since he entered office in 2001. These cuts have alarmed some educators and members of Congress. [1]

Fueling this alarm is the proposed elimination of 150 government programs, many of which serve low-income and other disadvantaged populations. Approximately one third of these programs are housed in ED, representing a cut of $4.3 billion. Among the programs slated for elimination are Even Start, GEAR UP, the two TRIO programs (Upward Bound and Talent Search), the Perkins Loans program, Safe and Drug-Free Schools, and the National Education Laboratories. The rationale for cutting these programs, according to the Administration, is to remove programs that are duplicative, had achieved their purpose, appeared to have no significant effect, and which were too small to have any discernible effect.

In exchange for these cuts, the Administration plans to launch a series of new programs to support the goals of the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act. These include a new High School Support Initiative, funding for high school assessments, increases in funds for Striving Readers and the Advanced Placement program, and a new secondary education mathematics and science initiative.

K-12 Education in the FY 2006 Administration budget

Since President Bush took office in 2001, most of the focus in education has been at the K-12 level. The passage of NCLB in 2001 paved the way for the infusion of dollars at the elementary and secondary levels. Although critics of NCLB have argued that the federal government has used NCLB as an underfunded-mandate, Congress has provided significant funds to education since 2001. The 2006 Administration request provides continued support to key NCLB programs. FY 2006 proposals for NCLB programs total $23.6 billion, or 5 percent above last year's budget, but $13 billion below the authorized level of $36.7 billion.

Studies by the Education Trust and the Council of Great City Schools show promising trends in reading and mathematics scores among certain student groups. The Education Trust finds that mathematics achievement had increased in 23 of 24 states, and reading achievement increased in 15 of 23 states, with three years of comparable data. [2] However, almost 21,000 schools failed to meet "adequate yearly progress" and 11,000 were designated as "in need of improvement." [3] Additional studies show that too few high school students are completing rigorous academic courses and that half of entering college students require remedial course work. [4] The Administration would level fund the State Assessments program ($412 million) designed to help states pay for the development of standards and assessments required under NCLB.

The Administration has proposed several new initiatives in this year's budget, including a High School Intervention Initiative. Designed to take the place of Upward Bound, Talent Search, and GEAR UP, this program aims to strengthen high school education through interventions aimed at at-risk and other students. The initiative provides $250 million to help states develop and implement high school assessments in reading/language arts and mathematics, $200 million (a 707 percent increase) for the Striving Readers program designed to improve reading skills for teenagers, and $120 million for a Secondary Education Mathematics Initiative. As well, $51.5 million would support the Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate programs, up $22 million, and a new State Scholars program ($12 million) will encourage high school students to complete rigorous courses during high school. Also new is the Enhanced Pell Grants for State Scholars who complete four years of rigorous high school courses ($33 million) and the Community College Access program, which provides $125 million to support dual-enrollment credit transfers for high school students taking college-level courses.

The Bush Administration continues its push for reading programs by requesting an increase in Title I funding by 4.7 percent to $13.3 billion. Two other reading-related programs would be level funded: Reading First Grants ($1.1 billion) and English Language Acquisition State Grants ($676 million). The Migrant Education State Agency Program would also stay at $390 million.

Most other education programs would be flat-funded in this year's budget with the exception of some significant program eliminations, including Star Schools ($20.8 million), which encourages improved instruction in mathematics, science, foreign language, and other subjects via telecommunications technology; Arts in Education ($35.6 million); Parental Assistance Information Centers ($41.9 million); Elementary and Secondary School Counseling ($34.7 million); and the Dropout Prevention program ($4.9 million).

The popular Head Start program would receive a slight increase of 0.7 percent ($45 million) to $6.8 billion. This increase only provides funding for a project involving a handful of states, thus does not impact the regular Head Start agencies. Taking inflation into account, it has been estimated that 25,000 children will lose services in the FY 2006 program year. However, the Administration additionally proposes to eliminate the Even Start Family Literacy Program ($225 million), which was first authorized in 1989 under Title I. Even Start currently provides services to approximately 52,000 pre-K children and 39,000 adults.

The Administration would increase Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) funding by 3.9 percent to $12.1 billion. This was accomplished by increasing state grants by $508 million (4.8 percent). State grants for pre-school ($385 million) and grants for infants and families ($441 million) would be level funded. According to the NEA, many school districts were forced to cut programs in the last fiscal year in order to meet the legal requirements of IDEA.

In the area of teacher training, the largest teacher-directed program in the ED budget, the Improving Teacher Quality State Grants ($2.9 billion), would stay constant in FY 2006. The grant program replaced the Eisenhower Professional Development Program and Class Size Reduction Programs under NCLB. The grant program provides funds to help states and school district recruit, train, and retain highly qualified teachers and principals. A new $500 million initiative, the Teacher Incentive Fund, is designed to reward effective teachers and create incentives to attract qualified teachers to high-need schools. Another new addition is the Adjunct Teacher Corps Initiative. This $40 million program is designed as an alternative certification program to bring well-qualified content experts from business and industry into schools. The Mathematics and Science Partnership (MSP), to increase the academic achievement of students in mathematics and science through teacher professional development, would increase 50 percent to $269 million.

Programs related to school choice garnered $440 million in the budget, half of which would be in the Charter Schools Grants. The Credit Enhancement for Charter School Facilities program, zero funded in FY 2005, would get $37 million in funds, equal to the FY 2004 appropriation. The Administration requests $50 million for the new Choice Incentive Fund to provide parents with expanded opportunities for transferring their children to higher-performing schools, and $27 million (same as this year) for the Voluntary Public School Choice grants to promote public school choice.

Higher Education in the Bush Education Budget

Postsecondary education in the budget lacks the coherence and overall strategy of the framework present in K-12 requests through the addition of the high school NCLB initiative. Similar to the 2005 budget proposal, the ED postsecondary budget reflects mostly program cuts and level-funded programs that include the elimination of programs at community colleges, college access programs, and small increases or cuts to student financial aid. The Administration's FY 2006 request includes $1.2 billion for Higher Education Programs that are proposed for reauthorization under the Higher Education Act.

The Pell Grant program, which provides aid to low-income students attending accredited institutions of higher education and is the mainstay of the federal student aid effort, would receive a 6.7 percent increase to $13.2 billion. This increase will provide a $100 increase in the maximum Pell Grant to $4,150. Approximately $4.7 billion of the total amount is allocated to make up for a budget shortfall of $4.3 billion in FY 2005 and to raise the Pell Grant maximum award by $100 for each of the next 5 years. These increases in funding are expected to be made through savings in the federal loan programs. Even with this increase in FY 2006, the maximum Pell Grant will cover only 39 percent of the cost of attendance of a four-year public college.

In total, the federal government provides $78 billion in grants, loans, and work-study. The student loan programs, the Federal Family Education Loan (FFEL) and the Federal Direct Student Loan (FDSL) programs would increase 8 percent in FY 2006 to total $60 billion ($45.5 billion $14.7 billion, respectively).

As noted above, the FY 2006 budget adds $33 million for an enhanced State Scholars Pell Grants program tied to the completion of the State Scholars high school program. This is proposed as part of the High School Initiative, and adds $50 million for a new Presidential Math-Science Scholars program, under which the Department of Education would enter into a public-private partnership to award $100 million annually in grants to low-income math and science students. Approximately 20,000 low-income students who receive Pell Grants would receive these separate, additional awards of up to $5,000 each.

Major news in this year's budget was the elimination of the Perkins Loan program. This program provides $66.1 million in low-interest loans to low- and middle-income students in FY 2005. For the fourth year in a row, Federal Work Study would be level-funded at $990.3 million as well as no increases recommended for the Federal Supplemental Educational Opportunity Grants program ($778.7 million). Within the ED loan programs, the Bush budget also eliminates the current low fixed-rate consolidation benefit, offering students a floating interest rate for the 25 years maximum term of the loan.

The budget also proposes the elimination of the $65.6 million Leveraging Educational Assistance Partnerships (LEAP) program, which leverages over $1 billion in state matching dollars for need-based postsecondary student grants. This elimination has become an almost annual event in the budget?-one that never quite makes the final cut. The Byrd Honor Scholarships would also be eliminated ($40.7 million).

Title III of the Higher Education Act provides funds for higher education institutions that serve high proportions of minority and low-income students. In total, $418.5 million is slated for the Title III "Aid for Institutional Development," with a slight increase of $240.5 million (0.8 percent) for Historically Black Colleges Universities (HBCUs) and $58.5 million for Historically Black Graduate Institutions (HBGIs). Level funding is proposed for Tribally Controlled Colleges and Universities, $23.3 million, $80.3 million for the "Strengthening Institutions" program, and $8.8 for the Minority Science and Engineering Improvement program. The Strengthening Alaska Native and Native Hawaiian-serving institutions would lose $5.4 million, a 45 percent cut in funding. In a separate Higher Education line item, Developing Hispanic-Serving Institutions would increase 0.8 percent increase to $95.9 million.

Three of the federal TRIO programs, Student Support Services, the Ronald E. McNair Post-baccalaureate Program, and Educational Opportunity Centers receive level funding at $369.4 million. The Administration proposes elimination of the two college access programs, Talent Search and Upward Bound and a cut to the Training Professional Development Program for $467.1 million. Under his plan, GEAR UP, another college preparation and access program, would be eliminated ($306.5 million). These $773.6 million from projects funded under higher education would be reallocated to activities in support of the High School Initiative described previously. There are concerns in the higher education community that access for low-income students, combined with minimal Pell increases, will pose additional challenges to attending college and completing a postsecondary degree.

Other items in the Higher Education Programs budget include flat funding of $106.8 million for International and Foreign Language Studies, $40.2 million for need-based scholarships and fellowships under the Javits Fellowships and GAANN, Graduate Assistance in Areas of National Need. GAANN institutions provide assurances that they will seek talented students from traditionally underrepresented backgrounds. The budget flat funds the Child Care Access Means Parents in School program at $16 million and $164.2 million for Research, Development and Dissemination. Also proposed for elimination are the Demonstration projects for Students with Disabilities ($6.9 million) and the Teacher Quality Enhancement Grants ($68.3 million).

One of the biggest changes to the Higher Education Budget for FY 2006 is the mixed message sent to community colleges through budget cuts and change in emphasis for funding areas, with the proposal to eliminate the entire $1.3 billion federal vocational and technical education programs (Carl D. Perkins Vocational and Technical Education Act). In the ED budget proposal, the vocational state grants that make up most of the $1.3 billion are described as "ineffective" by OMB. Reallocation of funds that currently go to states for high school and community college programs ($400 million annually) would now contribute to the new High School Initiative. States could still choose to fund vocational programs with that money. Coupled with 63 percent cuts for Adult Basic and Literacy Education, community colleges are very concerned about the Budget's support for two-year postsecondary education.

The Administration has included $125 million in new funds to support a new dual enrollment (high school/community college) initiative. There are concerns, however, from the community colleges and workforce alliances that this is a move away from career and technical education to supporting high school academic skills that would greatly impact services currently provided to low income and adult students.

Finally, the President's budget drastically cuts resources for the Fund for the Improvement of Post-secondary Education (FIPSE) by 86.3 percent to $22.2 million. FIPSE grants to postsecondary institutions support innovative reform projects that model resolution of problems in postsecondary education, as well as international programs.

Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) in Other Departments and Agencies

Funding for STEM activities in higher education and research in other federal agencies and departments includes cuts for basic research in the Departments of Agriculture, Defense, and Energy and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). This follows a trend that has been flat or declining in recent budgets. The budget provides only very small increases for the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the National Science Foundation (NSF), two of the largest federal sources for academic research and increasing minority and low-income participation in science, math, and engineering.

Overall, the NSF budget would increase by 2.4 percent to $5.6 billion (see Table II-7), but $19 million cuts are proposed for the Math-Science Partnership that funds university research on K-12 math and science. The President proposes funding increases to $269 million for a parallel math-science partnership in the ED High School Initiative. The NSF Directorate for Education and Human Resources (EHR) supports education, research, and infrastructure development in all STEM disciplines with the goal of preparing the next generation of STEM professionals, attracting and retaining Americans in STEM careers, increasing STEM literacy of all Americans, and closing the achievement gap in all STEM fields. Under the 2006 budget, EHR monies would decline by 12.4 percent or $104 million to $737 million. In addition to the Math-Science Partnerships, EHR activities and funding include: a 0.3 percent increase to $94 million for EPSCoR (Experimental Program to Stimulate Competitive Research); a decrease of 22.6 percent to $140.8 million for K-12 programs (ESIE) to develop effective instructional materials and provide preparation and professional development for teachers and instructional materials that promote scientific and technological literacy; a 12.1 percent cut to the Undergraduate Programs (DUE) that assist two- and four-year postsecondary institutions to expand STEM talent, prepare cybersecurity workforce, and promote women and minority students in STEM enterprises ($135 million); a very slight 0.2 percent increase to $155 million for Graduate Education programs (DGE) divided equally among the Graduate Research Fellowship Program, the Integrative Graduate Education and Research Traineeship Program, and the Graduate Teaching Fellows in K-12 Program; and a 43.2 percent cut (to $33 million from $59 million in FY2005) in funding of Research, Evaluation and Communication (REC) programs that develop scientific research methods and evaluate current programs across EHR, which may undercut NSF's ability to demonstrate outcome accountability.

The Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science sponsors a number of educational outreach activities in workforce development for teachers and science programs and would decline in total funding by 4.5 percent to $3.2 billion. The Workforce Development for Teachers and Scientists (WDTS) would be cut by $500,000 to $7.19 million. WDTS supports Undergraduate Internships for students planning to enter STEM careers, including teaching, Graduate and Faculty STEM Fellowships, Pre-college middle and high school science bowls, and the Scientists Teaching and Reaching Students (STARS) initiative, which promotes science literacy and outreach by national laboratory scientists and engineers.

Overall, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) will receive an increase of 0.7 percent for FY 2006 (see Table II-9). This is short of the rate of inflation (3.2 percent) in biomedical research. The agency estimates that only 21 percent of research project grant applications would receive funding in 2006, compared with 30 percent in 2003 and flat-funding for continuing awards. The agency also will decrease the number of Ruth L. Kirschstein National Research Service Awards to postdoctoral researchers by 397. This would allow for increased stipends for third year postdocs. Research to defend against biological weapons would remain a top NIH priority. As many as six new biodefense regional laboratories will be built this year to augment existing labs in the study of infectious diseases and the NIH "Roadmap" project would be increased by 42 percent to $333 million for multidisciplinary, innovate research and basic-research to develop new medical treatments.

The U. S. Department of Agriculture would shift monies from several formula-grant programs to allow for an increase in the National Research Initiative, the main competitive grants for agricultural research, an increase of 39 percent to $250 million, with additional sums earmarked for land-grant universities. NRI goals are increased graduate level-training opportunities in interdisciplinary research areas and the diversification of graduate student participation in agricultural research. The Cooperative State Research, Education and Extension Service (CSREES) is the federal partner with land grant and non-land grand colleges and universities in carrying out extramural research, higher education, and extension activities. In addition to NRI, CSREES includes additional funding for Master of Science level fellowships to recruit minority graduate students, and $15 million for the Native American Endowment Fund. Extension services under the Smith-Lever Act would remain level-funded and Hatch Act grants that pay for agriculture experiment stations at land-grant institutions would be halved to $89 million. (See Chapter 11 for more on USDA.)

Funding for the 1890 Institution Teaching and Research Capacity Building Grants was given a 1.5 percent increase to $12.5 million, but the 1890 Facilities Grants were reduced from $16.8 million to $14.9 million. These grants provide funds to the historically black land-grant institutions funded through the Morrill Act II in 1890, plus Tuskegee University, to build institutional capacity and develop innovative teaching and research projects in targeted need areas of the food and agricultural sciences.

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is working to ensure a pipeline of highly trained scientists for NASA, industry and academia by motivating students to pursue careers in STEM disciplines, developing unique educational teaching tools and teacher experiences, and engaging minority and underrepresented students, educators and researchers in the NASA education programs. The NASA Office of Education has requested $166.9 million, a sharp cut.

Conclusion

The President's budget was designed to send a message that it is belt-tightening time in Washington. K-12 program funding largely hinges on NCLB programs, which adds funds for academic rigor and testing and early reading programs. As with the past four budgets proposed by this Administration, higher education seems more of an afterthought, with all attention at the K-12 level. The Pell Grant program was given a lift, but at the cost of cuts in certain aspects of the loan programs (e.g., fees to servicers; elimination of fixed rates for consolidation loans). The biggest hits were aimed at programs such as Upward Bound, including Upward Bound Math and Science Program, GEAR UP, and other programs designed to help low-income and other disadvantaged youth prepare, aspire, and go to college.

With regard to science and technology funding, we are mindful that today's reductions in research and education programs may differentially affect disciplines and subfields for years to come. Students self-select out of careers based on perceptions of opportunities, including support for study and post-degree research. So while this budget has been about as fair as one might get given the cuts in other departments, it sends a mixed signal on STEM education?-expand the K-12 talent pool but constrict options for postsecondary education and training.



--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

[1] Davis, M. R. (2005). Spellings Defends President's Spending Plan for Education. Education Week; Davis, M. R. and S. Cavanaugh (2005). Other Agencies' Budgets Would Also Affect Education. Education Week. Washington, DC, 35; Robelen, E. W. (2005). Cuts Proposed in Bush Budget Hit Education. Education Week. Washington, DC: 1

[2] Education Trust (2004). Measured Progress. Washington, DC, Education Trust.

[3] NEA (2005). NEA Education Funding Priorities. (www.nea.org).

[4] U.S. Department of Education (2005). Fiscal Year 2006 Budget Summary ?- February 7, 2005. Washington, DC, U.S. Department of Education.

And this.

How Schools Cheat: From underreporting violence to inflating graduation rates to fudging testscores, educators are lying to the American public.
By Lisa Snell

On March 17, 2005, 15-year-old Delusa Allen was shot in the head while leaving Locke High School in Los Angeles, sending her into intensive care and eventually killing her. Four months before that several kids were injured in a riot at the same school, and last year the district had to settle a lawsuit by a student who required eye surgery after he was beaten there. In 2000, 17-year-old Deangelo Anderson was shot just across the street from Locke; he lay dead on the sidewalk for hours before the coroner came to collect his body.
Violent crime is common at Locke. According to the Los Angeles Police Department, in the 2003--04 school year its students suffered three sex offenses, 17 robberies, 25 batteries, and 11 assaults with a deadly weapon. And that's actually an improvement over some past years: In 2000-01 the school had 13 sex offenses, 43 robberies, 57 batteries, and 19 assaults with a deadly weapon.
Sounds unsafe, doesn't it? Not in the skewed world of official education statistics. Under the federal No Child Left Behind Act, states are supposed to designate hazardous schools as "persistently dangerous" and allow their students to transfer to safer institutions. But despite Locke's grim record, the state didn't think it qualified for the label.
Locke is not unique. In the 2003-04 school year only 26 of the nation's 91,000 public schools were labeled persistently dangerous. Forty-seven states and the District of Columbia proudly reported that they were home to not a single unsafe school. That would be news to the parents of James Richardson, a 17-year-old football player at Ballou Senior High in Southeast Washington, D.C., who was shot inside the school that very year. It would be news to quite a few people: The D.C. Office of the Inspector General reports that during that school year there were more than 1,700 "serious security incidents" in city schools, including 464 weapons offenses.
Most American schools are fairly safe, it's true, and the overall risk of being killed in one is less than one in 1.7 million. The data show a general decline in violence in American public schools: The National Center for Education Statistics' 2004 Indicators of School Crime and Safety shows that the crime victimization rate has been cut in half, declining from 48 violent victimizations per 1,000 students in 1992 to 24 in 2002, the last year for which there are complete statistics.
But that doesn't mean there has been a decline at every school. Most of the violence is concentrated in a few institutions. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, during the 1999-2000 school year 2 percent of U.S. schools (1,600) accounted for about 50 percent of serious violent incidents?-and 7 percent of public schools (5,400) accounted for 75 percent of serious violent incidents. The "persistently dangerous" label exists to identify such institutions.
So why are only 26 schools in the country tagged with it?
The underreporting of dangerous schools is only a subset of a larger problem. The amount of information about schools presented to the general public is at an all-time high, but the information isn't always useful or accurate.
Thanks to the No Child Left Behind Act, now three years old, parents are seeing more and more data about school performance. Each school now has to give itself an annual report card, with assessment results broken down by poverty, race, ethnicity, disability, and English-language proficiency. Schools also are supposed to accurately and completely report dropout rates and teacher qualifications. The quest for more and better information about school performance has been used as a justification to increase education spending at the local, state, and national levels, with the federal Department of Education alone jacking up spending to nearly $60 billion for fiscal year 2005, up more than $7 billion since 2003.
But while federal and state legislators congratulate themselves for their newfound focus on school accountability, scant attention is being paid to the quality of the data they're using. Whether the topic is violence, test scores, or dropout rates, school officials have found myriad methods to paint a prettier picture of their performance. These distortions hide the extent of schools' failures, deceive taxpayers about what our ever-increasing education budgets are buying, and keep kids locked in failing institutions. Meanwhile, Washington?-which has set national standards requiring 100 percent of school children to reach proficiency in math and reading by 2014?-has been complicit in letting states avoid sanctions by fiddling with their definitions of proficiency.
The federal government is spending billions to improve student achievement while simultaneously granting states license to game the system. As a result, schools have learned to lie with statistics.
Prospering Cheaters
Under No Child Left Behind, if schools fail to make adequate yearly progress on state tests for three consecutive years, students can use federal funds to transfer to higher-performing public or private schools, or to obtain supplemental education services from providers of their choice. In addition, schools that fail for four to five consecutive years may face state takeovers, have their staffs replaced, or be bid out to private management.
Wesley Elementary in Houston isn't a school you'd expect to be worried about those threats. From 1994 to 2003, Wesley won national accolades for teaching a majority of its low-income students how to read. Oprah Winfrey once featured it in a special segment on schools that "defy the odds," and in 2002 the Broad Foundation awarded the Houston Independent School District a $1 million prize for being the best urban school district in America, largely based on the performance of schools like Wesley.
It turned out that Oprah was righter than she realized: Wesley was defying the odds. A December 31, 2004, exposé by The Dallas Morning News found that in 2003 Wesley's fifth-graders performed in the top 10 percent in the state on the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills (TAKS) reading exams. The very next year, as sixth-graders at Houston's M.C. Williams Middle School, the same students fell to the bottom 10 percent.
The newspaper obtained raw testing data for 7,700 Texas public schools for 2003 and 2004. It found severe statistical anomalies in nearly 400 of them. The Houston, Dallas, and Fort Worth districts are now investigating dozens of their schools for possible cheating on the TAKS test. Fort Worth's most suspicious case was at A.M. Pate Elementary. In 2004, Pate fifth-graders finished in the top 5 percent of Texas students. In 2003, when those same students were fourth-graders, they had finished in the bottom 3 percent.
In the Winter 2004 issue of Education Next, University of Chicago economist Steven D. Levitt and Brian A. Jacob of Harvard's Kennedy School of Government explored the prevalence of cheating in public schools. Using data on test scores and student records from the Chicago public schools, Jacob and Levitt developed a statistical algorithm to identify classrooms where cheating was suspected. Their sample included all student test scores in grades 3-7 for the years 1993 to 2000. The final data set contained more than 40,000 "classroom years" of data and more than 700,000 "student year" observations. Jacob and Levitt's analysis looked for unexpected fluctuations in students' test scores and unusual patterns of answers for students within a classroom that might indicate skullduggery.
They found that on any given test the scores of students in 3 percent to 6 percent of classrooms are doctored by teachers or administrators. They also found some evidence of a correlation of cheating within schools, suggesting some centralized effort by a counselor, test coordinator, or principal. Jacob and Levitt argue that with the implementation of the No Child Left Behind Act, the incentives for teachers and administrators to manipulate the results from high-stakes tests will increase as schools begin to feel the consequences of low scores.
Texas' widespread cheating likely was a response both to high-stakes testing and to financial incentives for raising test scores. The Houston school district, for example, spends more than $7 million a year on performance bonuses that are largely tied to test scores. Those bonuses include up to $800 for teachers, $5,000 for principals, and $20,000 for higher-level administrators.
Texas is not the only state where schools have cheated on standardized tests. Teachers provided testing materials to students nearly a dozen times in 2003 in Nevada, for example. And Indiana has seen a raft of problems, including three Gary schools that were stripped of their accreditation in 2002 after hundreds of 10th-graders received answers for the Indiana Statewide Testing for Education Progress-Plus in advance. A teacher in Fort Wayne took a somewhat subtler approach in 2004, when school officials had to throw out her third-grade class's scores after she gave away answers by emphasizing certain words on oral test questions. In January 2005 another Fort Wayne third-grade teacher was suspended for tapping children on the shoulder to indicate a wrong answer.
Phantom Dropouts
If you want to make a school's performance look more impressive than it really is, you don't have to abet cheating on standardized tests. Instead you can misrepresent the dropout rate.
In 2003 The New York Times described an egregious example of this scam in Houston. Jerroll Tyler was severely truant from Houston's Sharpstown High School. When he showed up to take a math exam required for graduation, he was told he was no longer enrolled. He never returned.
So Tyler was surprised to learn, when the state audited his high school, that Sharpstown High had zero dropouts in 2002. According to the state audit of Houston's dropout data, Sharpstown reported that Tyler had enrolled in a charter school?-an institution he had never visited, much less attended. The 2003 state audit of the Houston district examined records from 16 middle and high schools, and found that more than half of the 5,500 students who left in the 2002 school year should have been declared dropouts but were not.
The Manhattan Institute's Jay P. Greene argues, in his 2004 paper "Public School Graduation Rates in the United States," that "this problem is neither recent nor confined to the Houston school district.…Official graduation rates going back many years have been highly misleading in New York City, Dallas, the state of California, the state of Washington, several Ohio school districts, and many other jurisdictions." Administrators, he explains, have strong incentives to count students who leave as anything other than dropouts. Next to test scores, graduation rates are an important measure of a school's performance: If parents and policy makers believe a school is producing a high number of graduates, they may not think reform is necessary. Greene writes that "when information on a student is ambiguous or missing, school and government officials are inclined to say that students moved away rather than say that they dropped out."
Greene and his associates have devised a more accurate method for calculating graduation rates. Simplifying a bit, it essentially counts the number of students enrolled in the ninth grade in a particular school or jurisdiction, makes adjustments for changes in the student population, and then counts the number of diplomas awarded when those same students leave high school. The percentage of original students who receive a diploma is the true graduation rate.
Using Greene's methodology, the national high school graduation rate for 2002 was 71 percent. Yet according to the National Center for Education Statistics, in 2002 the national high school "completion rate," defined as the percentage of adults 25 and older who had completed high school, was 85 percent. As Greene notes, "There were a total of 3,852,077 public school ninth-graders during the 1998-99 school year. In 2001-02, when that class was graduating, only 2,632,182 regular high school diplomas were distributed. Simply dividing these numbers produces a (very rough) graduation rate estimate of 68%." The states show similar discrepancies between their reported graduation rates and the number of students who actually receive diplomas.
As Sharpstown High School's former assistant principal, Robert Kimball, told The New York Times, "We go from 1,000 Freshman [sic] to less than 300 Seniors with no dropouts. Amazing!"
The problem isn't limited to Texas. In March researchers at Harvard's Civil Rights Project released an analysis of state graduation rates for 2002, in which they derived their figures by counting the number of students who move from one grade to the next and then on to graduation. The report found serious discrepancies between the rates calculated by the Civil Rights Project and those offered by education departments in all 50 states. In California, for example, the state reported an 83 percent graduation rate, but the Harvard report found that only 71 percent of students made it through high school.
The Civil Rights Project's paper also found a high dropout rate among minorities, which California officials hides behind state averages. Almost half of the Latino and African-American students who should have graduated from California high schools in 2002 failed to complete their education. In the Los Angeles Unified School District, just 39 percent of Latinos and 47 percent of African Americans graduated, compared with 67 percent of whites and 77 percent of Asians.
Moving the Goalposts on Proficiency
A subtler way to distort data is to report test scores as increasing when in fact more students have been excluded from taking the test. One egregious example of this practice took place in Florida, which grades schools from F to A based on their standardized test scores. Oak Ridge High School in Orlando boosted its test scores from an F to a D in 2004 after purging its attendance rolls of 126 low-performing students.
The students were cut from school enrollment records without their parents' permission, a violation of state law. According to the Orlando Sentinel, about three-quarters of the students had at least one F in their classes, and 80 percent were ninth- or 10th-graders?-a key group, because Florida counts only the scores of freshmen and sophomores for school grades. More than half of the students returned to Oak Ridge a few weeks after state testing.
The Sentinel also reported that in 2004 some 160 Florida schools assigned students to new schools just before standardized testing in a shell game to raise school grades. In Polk County, for example, 70 percent of the students who were reassigned to new schools scored poorly on Florida's Comprehensive Assessment Test, suggesting they were moved to avoid giving their old schools a bad grade.
Florida is not alone. In a third of Houston's 30 high schools, scores on standardized exams have risen as enrollment has shrunk. At Austin High, for example, 2,757 students were enrolled in the 1997-98 school year, when only 65 percent passed the 10th-grade math test. Three years later, 99 percent of students passed the math exam, but enrollment had shrunk to 2,215 students. The school also reported that dropout figures had plummeted from 4.1 percent to 0.3 percent. Rather than a sudden 20 percent drop in enrollment, the school had used a strategy of holding back low-scoring ninth-graders and then promoting them directly to 11th grade to avoid the 10th-grade exam.
States are also excluding a higher percentage of disabled students and students for whom English is a second language. (Needless to say, these exclusion rates are not reported with the test score data.) And states often report that their test scores are going up when they've merely dumbed-down their standards by changing the percentage of correct responses necessary to be labeled "proficient" or by changing the content of the tests to make them easier. Of the 41 states that have reported their 2004 No Child Left Behind test results so far, 35?-including all of the states showing improvement?-had schools meet the targets not by improving the schools but by amending the rules that determine which schools pass and which fail.
For example, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported last October that Pennsylvania's "improvements" were a result of lower standards, not improved performance. These changes, approved by the federal government, allowed schools with lower graduation rates, lower standardized test scores, or lower attendance than in previous years to win passing marks. In 2004, 81 percent of the state's schools met No Child Left Behind's adequate yearly progress benchmarks using the new standards. But the Inquirer analysis found that if the same rules used in 2003 had been used in 2004, the number of schools falling short of the yearly benchmark would have grown from 566 to 1,164. Instead of 81 percent meeting the benchmark, just 61 percent would have succeeded. When the Pennsylvania Education Department announced in August that only 566 of 3,009 public schools failed to meet federal standards, it neglected to mention the role the rule changes played in the "significant gains" made.
This sort of thing has been going on for a while. Back in 2002 Education Week reported that "a number of states appear to be easing their standards for what it means to be ?'proficient' in reading and math because of pressures to comply with a new federal law requiring states to make sure all students are proficient on state tests in those subjects within 12 years. In Louisiana, for instance, students will be considered proficient for purposes of the federal law when they score at the ?'basic' achievement level on their state's assessment. Connecticut schoolchildren will be deemed proficient even if they fall shy of the state's performance goals in reading and mathematics. And Colorado students who score in the ?'partially proficient' level on their state test will be judged proficient."
The federal government actually gives a seal of approval to states that are lowering the standards they had before Bush's era of "accountability." For example, the U.S. Department of Education allowed Washington state to lower its high school graduation rate from 73 percent to 66 percent and still meet No Child Left Behind requirements?-with the promise of an 85 percent graduation rate by 2014. Apparently, the feds are spending billions to compel states to reduce their academic standards.
Lying by Omission
But the most common way school data deceive people is through omission. State and local education officials simply do not define their terms for the media or the general public. As we've already seen, "persistently dangerous" doesn't mean the same thing to officials that it means to you and me.
Another example: My local newspaper lists area schools that have met No Child Left Behind goals and are compliant with federal law. The article will tell you that every subgroup, from low-income children and Hispanics to special education children, is proficient in reading and in math. It will not say that in California, in order for yearly progress for each subgroup to be considered adequate, only 13 percent of the children in each group must be proficient. Imagine the difference?-and how much more helpful it would be to a concerned parent trying to decide what is best for her child?-if the newspaper article said, "Here is a list of schools where at least 13 percent of children in each group are proficient."
The newspaper should also explain what it really means to be "proficient" in reading. To be considered proficient for the third grade in California, you must score at the 51st percentile in reading and the 63rd percentile in math on California's standardized STAR test. In other words, all it really means when my school is listed as meeting "adequate yearly progress" under No Child Left Behind is that at least 13 percent of third-graders in every subgroup scored at the 51st percentile on the reading test.
Most parents assume that "proficiency" means grade-level performance. But proficiency standards are so different from state to state that students with the same skills will have very different proficiency rates. In third-grade reading, for example, Texas sets its cut score?-the correct number of responses or percentile ranking a student needs to be considered proficient?-at the 13th percentile. Nevada sets its cut score at the 58th percentile.
All this only scratches the surface of the ways schools use statistics to mislead parents and the public. From reporting teachers' salaries without including benefits as part of their compensation to reporting per-pupil spending while excluding billions in spending on school buildings and infrastructure, the list of deceptions goes on and on.
The No Child Left Behind Act was supposed to let parents and policy makers identify and fix failing schools. More important, it was supposed to give kids a right of exit out of failing or dangerous institutions. But that's meaningless if "failing" and "dangerous" can be defined away. Despite the violence at Locke High School, the teaching failures at Wesley Elementary School, and the high dropout rates at Sharpstown High School, the average kid in those institutions is no closer to escaping now than before the law was passed. And despite the glut of information being offered to parents?-and the glut of dollars being spent on education?-most families rarely see the facts about their schools' performance.
No Child Left Behind was sold as a way to make the schools more accountable. Instead, it has encouraged and abetted them as they distort the data and game the system. That may be the worst deception of all.
Lisa Snell is director of the Reason Foundation's education program.

It's simply NOT working here:

http://www.newsobserver.com/news/story/2607050p-9042223c.html

http://www.newsobserver.com/news/story/2607048p-9042222c.html

I think observing, and honestly admitting, that a school system isn't meeting the requirements is not the same thing as saying the program isn't working. The Albuquerque Public Schools are also having their problems and they no doubt had it much easier showing required improvements than Orange County. Orange County has historically had very good schools. APD has not. But knowing weaknesses and struggling to overcome them can't do anything but help in both.

Here's one educator who believes it is working:

Dogma versus reality
Thomas Sowell (archive)
July 19, 2005 | Print | Recommend to a friend

There have been many bitter complaints from teachers and principals about the Bush administration's "No Child Left Behind" act -- and more specifically about having to "teach to the test" instead of doing whatever teachers and principals want to do.

Now the results are in.

Not only have test scores in math and reading shown "solid gains" in the words of the New York Times, young black students have "significantly narrowed the gap" between themselves and white students. All this is based on official annual data from 28,000 schools across the country.

What is especially revealing is that it is the young black students who have made the largest gains while older minority students "scored as far behind whites as in previous decades."

In other words, the children whose education has taken place mostly since the No Child Left Behind act show the greatest gains, while for those whose education took place mostly under the old system, it was apparently too late to repair the damage.

Do not expect either the New York Times or the education establishment to draw these conclusions from these data. Nor are black "leaders" likely to pay much attention, since they are preoccupied with such hustles as seeking reparations for slavery.

"By their fruits ye shall know them" may be an ancient adage but results take a back seat to dogma when it comes to the education establishment. That is why there has been so little to show for all the additional billions of dollars poured into American education during the past three decades.

Ironically, there was another report issued recently, this one giving results of opinion polls among professors of education, the people who train our public school teachers. It is also very revealing as to what has been so wrong for so long in our schools.

Take something as basic as what teachers should be doing in the classroom. Should teachers be "conveyors of knowledge who enlighten their students with what they know"? Or should teachers "see themselves as facilitators of learning who enable their students to learn on their own"?

Ninety two percent of the professors of education said that teachers should be "facilitators" rather than engaging in what is today called "directed instruction" -- and what used to be called just plain teaching.

The fashionable phrase among educators today is that the teacher should not be "a sage on the stage" but "a guide on the side."

Is the 92 percent vote for the guide over the sage based on any hard evidence, any actual results? No. It has remained the prevailing dogma in schools of education during all the years when our test scores stagnated and American children have been repeatedly outperformed in international tests by children from other countries.

Our children have been particularly outperformed in math, with American children usually ending up at or near the bottom in international math tests. But this has not made a dent in our education establishment's dogmas about the way to teach math.

What is more important in math, that children "know the right answers to the questions" or that they "struggle with the process" of trying to find the right answers? Among professors of education, 86 percent choose "struggling" over knowing.

This is all part of a larger vision in which children "discover" their own knowledge rather than have teachers pass on to them the knowledge of what others have already discovered. The idea that children will "discover" knowledge that took scholars and geniuses decades, or even generations, to produce is truly a faith which passeth all understanding.

What about discipline problems in our schools? Fewer than half of the professors of education considered discipline "absolutely essential" to the educational process. As one professor of education put it, "When you have students engaged and not vessels to receive information, you tend to have fewer discipline problems."

All the evidence points in the opposite direction. But what is mere evidence compared to education dogmas? We need more "teaching to the test" so that dogmas can be subjected to evidence.
LINK

Dear Friends,

Buried deep within the No Child Left Behind Act is a provision that requires public high schools to hand over the private contact information of students to military recruiters. If a school does not comply, it risks losing vital federal education funds. As if that weren't bad enough, the Pentagon has now built an illegal database of 30 million 16-25 year olds as another recruitment tool.

Protect our children by helping them "Opt Out"!
Working Assets has helped create the Leave My Child Alone coalition to make it easy to protect children from unwanted military recruiting by getting their names off both Pentagon and high school recruiting lists. To opt your child out, go to:

www.leavemychildalone.org/optout

Most parents don't even know about the need to opt out. Please forward this email to parents, grandparents, and teachers you know. Tell them to visit LeaveMyChildAlone.org for more information and all the forms needed to opt out.



Repeal No Child Left Behind's Military Recruiting Provision
The Student Privacy Protection Act of 2005 amends section 9528 of No Child Left Behind to prohibit military recruiters from contacting students unless these minors and their parents specifically "opt in" and consent to receive such communications. Click here to become a Citizen Co-Sponsor of the Student Privacy Protection Act.

www.leavemychildalone.org/HR551

Want to tell the Pentagon that their database is a violation of privacy? To send a letter telling them to shut down their illegal database, go to: www.leavemychildalone.org/act



How can I make a difference in my school district?
From September 7 to 30, Leave My Child Alone coalition partners will be mounting a nationwide Back-to-School campaign complete with events in all 50 states plus D.C.

You can join up with other concerned parents, teachers, grandparents, veterans and members of your local community by attending or organizing school board meeting outings to advocate for opt out policies and pass model school board resolutions. To find out about events near you or to find out how you can organize an event yourself, go to:

www.leavemychildalone.org/eventcenter

Do you know school principals, parent group officers, school board members or other people in a position to change school policy on military opt-out procedures? Tell them to visit LeaveMyChildAlone.org for organizing resources or simply email Catherine ([email protected]) to find out how we can help them make a difference in their district.

Thank you for helping to build a better world.

Catherine Geanuracos
Campaign Organizer
Leave My Child Alone Coalition/ Working Assets

Holy sh!t.
Those caulksuckers will do anything to wrangle another one in.

....bottom feeders....!!

I have just one piece of input at this time: summarize!

Interesting program on CNNs Lou Dobbs right now. They said the drop out rate for high schoolers are the highest in history, and minority drop outs are as high as fifty percent. Teachers and administrators lie to keep their scores high.

No Child Left Behind is a spoof; it's more like an oxymoron and a joke.

August 29, 2005

Left Behind, Way Behind
By BOB HERBERT

First the bad news: Only about two-thirds of American teenagers (and just half of all black, Latino and Native American teens) graduate with a regular diploma four years after they enter high school.

Now the worse news: Of those who graduate, only about half read well enough to succeed in college.

Don't even bother to ask how many are proficient enough in math and science to handle college-level work. It's not pretty.

Of all the factors combining to shape the future of the U.S., this is one of the most important. Millions of American kids are not even making it through high school in an era in which a four-year college degree is becoming a prerequisite for achieving (or maintaining) a middle-class lifestyle.

The Program for International Assessment, which compiles reports on the reading and math skills of 15-year-olds, found that the U.S. ranked 24th out of 29 nations surveyed in math literacy. The same result for the U.S. - 24th out of 29 - was found when the problem-solving abilities of 15-year-olds were tested.

If academic performance were an international athletic event, spectators would be watching American kids falling embarrassingly behind in a number of crucial categories. A new report from a pair of Washington think tanks - the Center for American Progress and the Institute for America's Future - says an urgent new commitment to public education, much stronger than the No Child Left Behind law, must be made if that slide is to be reversed.

This would not be a minor task. In much of the nation the public education system is in shambles. And the kids who need the most help - poor children from inner cities and rural areas - often attend the worst schools.

An education task force established by the center and the institute noted the following:

"Young low-income and minority children are more likely to start school without having gained important school readiness skills, such as recognizing letters and counting. ... By the fourth grade, low-income students read about three grade levels behind nonpoor students. Across the nation, only 15 percent of low-income fourth graders achieved proficiency in reading in 2003, compared to 41 percent of nonpoor students."

How's that for a disturbing passage? Not only is the picture horribly bleak for low-income and minority kids, but we find that only 41 percent of nonpoor fourth graders can read proficiently.

I respectfully suggest that we may be looking at a crisis here.

The report, titled "Getting Smarter, Becoming Fairer," restates a point that by now should be clear to most thoughtful Americans: too many American kids are ill equipped educationally to compete successfully in an ever-more competitive global environment.

Cartoonish characters like Snoop Dogg and Paris Hilton may be good for a laugh, but they're useless as role models. It's the kids who are logging long hours in the college labs, libraries and lecture halls who will most easily remain afloat in the tremendous waves of competition that have already engulfed large segments of the American work force.

The report makes several recommendations. It says the amount of time that children spend in school should be substantially increased by lengthening the school day and, in some cases, the school year. It calls for the development of voluntary, rigorous national curriculum standards in core subject areas and a consensus on what students should know and be able to do by the time they graduate from high school.

The report also urges, as many have before, that the nation take seriously the daunting (and expensive) task of getting highly qualified teachers into all classrooms. And it suggests that an effort be made to connect schools in low-income areas more closely with the surrounding communities. (Where necessary, the missions of such schools would be extended to provide additional services for children whose schooling is affected by such problems as inadequate health care, poor housing, or a lack of parental support.)

The task force's recommendations are points of departure that can be discussed, argued about and improved upon by people who sincerely want to ramp up the quality of public education in the U.S. What is most important about the report is the fact that it sounds an alarm about a critical problem that is not getting nearly enough serious attention.

E-mail: [email protected]

* Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

Here's something that seems to be working:

As Test Scores Jump, Raleigh Credits Integration by Income

By ALAN FINDER
Published: September 25, 2005
RALEIGH, N.C. - Over the last decade, black and Hispanic students here in Wake County have made such dramatic strides in standardized reading and math tests that it has caught the attention of education experts around the country.

Skip to next paragraph

Jenny Warburg for The New York Times
Schools in Wake County, N.C., are economically diverse by design.
The main reason for the students' dramatic improvement, say officials and parents in the county, which includes Raleigh and its sprawling suburbs, is that the district has made a concerted effort to integrate the schools economically.

Since 2000, school officials have used income as a prime factor in assigning students to schools, with the goal of limiting the proportion of low-income students in any school to no more than 40 percent.

The effort is the most ambitious in the country to create economically diverse public schools, and it is the most successful, according to several independent experts. La Crosse, Wis.; St. Lucie County, Fla.; San Francisco; Cambridge, Mass.; and Charlotte-Mecklenburg, N.C., have adopted economic integration plans.

In Wake County, only 40 percent of black students in grades three through eight scored at grade level on state tests a decade ago. Last spring, 80 percent did. Hispanic students have made similar strides. Overall, 91 percent of students in those grades scored at grade level in the spring, up from 79 percent 10 years ago.

School officials here have tried many tactics to improve student performance. Teachers get bonuses when their schools make significant progress in standardized tests, and the district uses sophisticated data gathering to identify, and respond to, students' weaknesses.

Some of the strategies used in Wake County could be replicated across the country, the experts said, but they also cautioned that unusual circumstances have helped make the politically delicate task of economic integration possible here.

The school district is countywide, which makes it far easier to combine students from the city and suburbs. The county has a 30-year history of busing students for racial integration, and many parents and students are accustomed to long bus rides to distant schools. The local economy is robust, and the district is growing rapidly. And corporate leaders and newspaper editorial pages here have firmly supported economic diversity in the schools.

Some experts said the academic results in Wake County were particularly significant because they bolstered research that showed low-income students did best when they attended middle-class schools.

"Low-income students who have an opportunity to go to middle-class schools are surrounded by peers who have bigger dreams and who are more academically engaged," said Richard D. Kahlenberg, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation who has written about economic integration in schools. "They are surrounded by parents who are more likely to be active in the school. And they are taught by teachers who more likely are highly qualified than the teachers in low-income schools."

To achieve a balance of low- and middle-income children in every school, the Wake County school district encourages and sometimes requires students to attend schools far from home. Suburban students are drawn to magnet schools in the city. Low-income children from the city are bused to middle-class schools in the suburbs.

Some parents chafe at the length of their children's bus rides or at what they see as social engineering. But the test results are hard to dispute, proponents of economic integration say, as is the broad appeal of the school district, which has been growing by 5,000 students a year.

"What I say to parents is, 'Here is what you should hold me accountable for: at the end of that bus ride, are we providing a quality education for your child?' " Bill McNeal, the school superintendent, said.

Asked how parents respond, Mr. McNeal said, "They are coming back, and they are bringing their friends."

Not everyone supports the strategy, of course. Some parents deeply oppose mandatory assignments to schools. Every winter, the district, using a complicated formula, develops a list of students who will be reassigned to new schools for the following academic year, and nearly every year some parents object vehemently.

HOw about that? This administration bought media time to tell the public all the positives of NCLB - all one-sided sell with taxpayer money.

October 1, 2005
Buying of News by Bush's Aides Is Ruled Illegal
By ROBERT PEAR
WASHINGTON, Sept. 30 - Federal auditors said on Friday that the Bush administration violated the law by buying favorable news coverage of President Bush's education policies, by making payments to the conservative commentator Armstrong Williams and by hiring a public relations company to analyze media perceptions of the Republican Party.

In a blistering report, the investigators, from the Government Accountability Office, said the administration had disseminated "covert propaganda" in the United States, in violation of a statutory ban.

The contract with Mr. Williams and the general contours of the public relations campaign had been known for months. The report Friday provided the first definitive ruling on the legality of the activities.

Lawyers from the accountability office, an independent nonpartisan arm of Congress, found that the administration systematically analyzed news articles to see if they carried the message, "The Bush administration/the G.O.P. is committed to education."

The auditors declared: "We see no use for such information except for partisan political purposes. Engaging in a purely political activity such as this is not a proper use of appropriated funds."

The report also sharply criticized the Education Department for telling Ketchum Inc., a public relations company, to pay Mr. Williams for newspaper columns and television appearances praising Mr. Bush's education initiative, the No Child Left Behind Act.

When that arrangement became public, it set off widespread criticism. At a news conference in January, Mr. Bush said: "We will not be paying commentators to advance our agenda. Our agenda ought to be able to stand on its own two feet."

But the Education Department has since defended its payments to Mr. Williams, saying his commentaries were "no more than the legitimate dissemination of information to the public."

The G.A.O. said the Education Department had no money or authority to "procure favorable commentary in violation of the publicity or propaganda prohibition" in federal law.

The ruling comes with no penalty, but under federal law the department is supposed to report the violations to the White House and Congress.

In the course of its work, the accountability office discovered a previously undisclosed instance in which the Education Department had commissioned a newspaper article. The article, on the "declining science literacy of students," was distributed by the North American Precis Syndicate and appeared in numerous small newspapers around the country. Readers were not informed of the government's role in the writing of the article, which praised the department's role in promoting science education.

Schools Cut Back Subjects to Push Reading and Math
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By SAM DILLON
Published: March 26, 2006
SACRAMENTO ?- Thousands of schools across the nation are responding to the reading and math testing requirements laid out in No Child Left Behind, President Bush's signature education law, by reducing class time spent on other subjects and, for some low-proficiency students, eliminating it.

Schools from Vermont to California are increasing ?- in some cases tripling ?- the class time that low-proficiency students spend on reading and math, mainly because the federal law, signed in 2002, requires annual exams only in those subjects and punishes schools that fall short of rising benchmarks.

The changes appear to principally affect schools and students who test below grade level.

The intense focus on the two basic skills is a sea change in American instructional practice, with many schools that once offered rich curriculums now systematically trimming courses like social studies, science and art. A nationwide survey by a nonpartisan group that is to be made public on March 28 indicates that the practice, known as narrowing the curriculum, has become standard procedure in many communities.

The survey, by the Center on Education Policy, found that since the passage of the federal law, 71 percent of the nation's 15,000 school districts had reduced the hours of instructional time spent on history, music and other subjects to open up more time for reading and math. The center is an independent group that has made a thorough study of the new act and has published a detailed yearly report on the implementation of the law in dozens of districts.

"Narrowing the curriculum has clearly become a nationwide pattern," said Jack Jennings, the president of the center, which is based in Washington.



Is there a problem with this shift in curriculum? If so, why? If not, why not?

I'll try to forma coherent post about this topic as I get through my first courses in elementary ed. Most teachers I know think this sucks. Some think it's a neccessary evil, most don't think it's neccessary. I will be writing a paper on the value, or lack thereof, of comparing our students' test scores with those of students in other countries....... One of the tenets of the NCLB act.

No Child Left Behind yields positive results
Don Campbell "buried the lead" in his commentary criticizing the No Child Left Behind Act ("Education, chutzpah and the GOP," The Forum, Feb. 23).

Campbell waited until the third-to-last paragraph to reveal his true feelings: "Not all children can perform" at grade level because they "live in such dysfunctional or impoverished environments."

This attitude ?- the "soft bigotry of low expectations," in the president's words ?- is exactly why we need the No Child Left Behind Act. The law, supported overwhelmingly by Democrats and Republicans alike, is finally ending the practice of shuffling schoolchildren along from grade to grade regardless of whether they've mastered the material.

The law is working as advertised, as Campbell reluctantly admits. Math scores in the earlier grades are at all-time highs, and the "achievement gaps" between white, Hispanic and African-American 9-year-olds have reached historic lows.

But we're changing more than numbers. We're changing behavior. The result can be seen in schools such as Maury Elementary in Alexandria, Va. In 2004, just two out of five third-graders passed the state's reading test. Some parents transferred their children to better-performing schools. This wake-up call was just what was needed. A new principal and teachers were hired, the school met its academic goals and enrollment is now up 20%.

Campbell believes that schools and students cannot change and therefore should not be "stigmatized" by accountability. What a pessimistic view of the world. In truth, a student who falls behind one year can surge ahead the next.

The No Child Left Behind Act gives students a chance to do better by helping schools to do their best.
http://www.usatoday.com/news/opinion/editorials/2006-03-01-letters-nclb_x.htm

Fox, Don't you ever keep up with the news? Half of black students drop out of high school. There's nothing "positive" about that! Get a life.

My opinion Macarena Hernandez :
Accountability is trumping learning
My opinion Macarena Hernandez
Tucson, Arizona | Published: 08.01.2006
When I was teaching sophomore English in 1998, one of my students, a stocky 16-year-old football player, came up to me one day after class to say he wanted to transfer out.
His last English teacher, he said, spent much more time preparing her class for the state's standardized assessment test, mostly by having students bubble in sample tests. He had decided my class, where we analyzed poetry and wrote essays constantly, wasn't going to help him pass the test.
"If I fail, Miss, it's going to be all your fault," he told me.
He wasn't the only one afraid. Many other students, as well as my colleagues, were, too.
Today, in this "no child left behind" culture, less than 10 years after my year teaching public school, the stakes are even higher and the fear, I suspect, even more rampant.
There is so much riding on this test. For the kids, advancing to the next grade and, ultimately, graduating from high school. For the teachers, their salaries and job evaluations. For the school districts, public money and the right to stay open.
These days, the only acceptable way to measure progress seems to be through these tests, and they're completely changing the way teachers teach and students learn. Practice-test drills are common, teachers tell me, and they also complain they have to suppress their creative juices as supervisors demand they play it safe with dumbed-down, rigid curriculums.
Our students no longer have to pass a test to prove they've learned. Now they learn tricks just so they can pass a test.
But something even more troubling than these misplaced priorities is happening in our schools ?- a growing culture of cheating. And it's contaminating not only students, but also teachers, principals and higher-ups. Across the country, from New Jersey to Florida to California, school districts have investigated charges that testing administrators are not only slipping answers to students, but also changing the exam sheets after they've been turned in.
As The Dallas Morning News recently reported, a state-commissioned study found suspicious scores in more than 609 schools and 702 classrooms across Texas. That's about 8 percent of Texas' public schools. But according to the News' own analysis, this list left out at least 167 campuses with testing irregularities ?- mostly high incidences of erased answers and unusual response patterns.
At first, the Texas Education Agency (TEA), which paid more than a half-million dollars for the report, seemed unable or unwilling to investigate the allegations. It appeared to be content with limiting the investigation to the few schools already accused of other testing violations. The agency also would not release the names of the campuses on the list, not even to the school districts in question.
Only after reporters pressed for disclosure under the state's open-records law did the TEA decide to investigate. The TEA announced that it would start its investigation with 14 schools that, under a new state incentive plan, are to receive $60,000 to $220,000 each for improving test scores.
To be fair, many schools on the list of suspected cheaters no doubt deserve to be cleared. But it's safe to assume many others have done wrong. If the TEA ends up blowing off this investigation, expect next year's list of suspects to grow. With little accountability, those too scared to fail may well be tempted to cheat again.
I was scared, too, in those months before my students took their test back in 1998. But I still refused to teach the test, and that's what I told the football player. Somehow, I persuaded him to stick it out in my class, and he ended up passing both the reading and writing sections that year. No doubt, schools must be held accountable, but it must not come at the expense of learning.

My opinion
Macarena Hernandez
Macarena Hernandez is a Dallas Morning News editorial columnist. E-mail her at [email protected].

Has anyone read Left BAck: A Century of Failed School REforms by Diane Ravitch?

pom, No, but did you read it? If you did, can you post a synopsis?

Most recent revelations about No Child Left Behind is that not only minorities (blacks and hispanics) are dropping out at 50 percent rate from high school, but white student dropouts have also increased.

Not only that, but US students are dropping in science and math skills.

Why aren't more people concerned? It boggles the mind.