Why NCLB Was Doomed to Fail

When it comes to high school graduation rates, Mississippi keeps two sets of books.

One team of statisticians working at the state education headquarters here recently calculated the official graduation rate at a respectable 87 percent, which Mississippi reported to Washington. But in another office piled with computer printouts, a second team of number crunchers came up with a different rate: a more sobering 63 percent.

The state schools superintendent, Hank Bounds, says the lower rate is more accurate and uses it in a campaign to combat a dropout crisis.

“We were losing about 13,000 dropouts a year, but publishing reports that said we had graduation rate percentages in the mid-80s,” Mr. Bounds said. “Mathematically, that just doesn’t work out.”

Like Mississippi, many states use an inflated graduation rate for federal reporting requirements under the No Child Left Behind law and a different one at home. As a result, researchers say, federal figures obscure a dropout epidemic so severe that only about 70 percent of the one million American students who start ninth grade each year graduate four years later.

California, for example, sends to Washington an official graduation rate of 83 percent but reports an estimated 67 percent on a state Web site. Delaware reported 84 percent to the federal government but publicized four lower rates at home.

The multiple rates have many causes. Some states have long obscured their real numbers to avoid embarrassment. Others have only recently developed data-tracking systems that allow them to follow dropouts accurately.

The No Child law is also at fault. The law set ambitious goals, enforced through sanctions, to make every student proficient in math and reading. But it established no national school completion goals.

“I liken N.C.L.B. to a mile race,” said Bob Wise, a former West Virginia governor who is president of the Alliance for Excellent Education, a group that seeks to improve schools. “Under N.C.L.B., students are tested rigorously every tenth of a mile. But nobody keeps track as to whether they cross the finish line.”… [emphasis added]

Inserted from <NY Times>

NCLB is fraught with problems, not the least of which is its mandates of standards while cutting aid to schools. Realistically the only way states can avoid losing the reduced funding that remains after the GOP gutted support for education is to push failing students out of the system, especially in poor school districts. That keeps the numbers high to game the system.

Bush, McConJob the GOP claim NCLB needs some minor adjustments, and the nobody could have foreseen the problems, but this, of course is a lie. NCLB was designed from the outset to push poor students from education. How can I say that? When Potomac Pinocchio was Governor of Texas and instituted the forerunner of NCLB there, he used the exact same tactic of pushing out the poor students to cook the books to compile the statistics he used to sell NCLB to Congress in the first place!

Cross-posted from Politics Plus