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April 21, 2006
No Child Left Behind tinkering
Categories: Classes
This story describes how the Secretary of Education is pushing forr an examination of a portion of the NCLB act that lets states set their own minimum number of scores reported under the act.
The fact that states omit scores from reporting is not terribly surprising, nor do I think it's some big conspiracy. Giving states power to set the mimimum amout of data needed for their analysis seems like a reasonable thing to do, given the wide variety of student populations and organizational structures in each state. Measuring the entire population is not necessary to generate reliable data, you just need a sample that is representative and statistically significant. But is there potential for abuse? Certainly.
What's also interesting about this story (and other NCLB stories) is how Spellings and the Federal government typically ends up framing the debate as "the federal government wants what's best for all children and the states keep getting in the way of that." I'm not sure that's entirely true, but it makes the Department of Ed. look like the good guys.
Interesting tidbits at the end of the article. I'll have to track down the entire AP study.
Posted by Nakia at April 21, 2006 08:52 AM