Several states to get flexibility in how to gauge student progress
Associated PressPublished November 19, 2005
WASHINGTON - Education Secretary Margaret Spellings told state school chiefs Friday that some of them will win freedom in the area they worry about most: showing student progress. But every child, she said, must still be up to par in reading and math by 2014.
Spellings said she will let as many as 10 states measure student progress by tracking kids over time, her latest effort to be flexible in enforcing President Bush's education policy.
Until now, states could only meet their annual goals by comparing the scores of different groups of kids from one year to the next, a system that many educators consider to be unfair.
The policy change drew praise from state leaders and teachers unions.
Although the way progress is measured is a technical issue, it is hugely important to schools and the millions of students they educate.
Schools that get federal poverty aid and don't make enough yearly progress face federal penalties, and states have been clamoring for new ways to chart how their students perform.
Any state can apply for the flexibility.
Office headed by former Rumsfeld policy chief under investigationWASHINGTON - The Pentagon's inspector general has begun an investigation into allegations that an office run by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld's former policy chief, Douglas J. Feith, engaged in illegal or inappropriate intelligence activities before the Iraq war.
The investigation, which two senators requested two months ago, comes at a contentious point in the political debate over President Bush's decision to invade Iraq and the intelligence upon which Bush based his decision.
Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., a critic of Bush's Iraq policy, has accused Feith of engaging in inappropriate intelligence activities at the Pentagon and of deceiving Congress about intelligence on Iraq's prewar links to the al-Qaida terrorist network.
Feith said the allegations are groundless.
"These matters have been carefully reviewed already," he said, referring to a bipartisan congressional inquiry in 2004. "They concluded that my office worked properly and that it in fact improved the intelligence product by asking good questions. I'm confident the Defense Department inspector general will come to the same conclusion."