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Competing standards

How can a school get an A from the state, but be declared failing by the federal government? Because neither mandate is perfect.

By Times editorial
Published June 18, 2006

Gov. Jeb Bush finally has called out his brother, President Bush, on a federal law that makes Florida schools look worse than they are. But the battle over conflicting education reforms is entirely of their own making. In their hands, the standardized test has become a blunt instrument intended to beat diverse schools into identical shapes, and the Bush brothers are pounding away from different angles.

The point Gov. Bush was trying to make Wednesday, upon release of some glowing test results, is that the federal No Child Left Behind Act uses an unrealistic and impossibly rigid formula to assess schools. Under the federal law, a school fails if either the overall student body or any of eight identified subgroups of students fails to meet the target on reading, math and writing tests. The state, on the other hand, factors both the total scores, lowest scores and the overall improvement in scores.

"With no disrespect to anyone in Washington," Gov. Bush told reporters, "I believe our system is the most comprehensive system of measuring how schools are doing based on student learning, by far."

This might be one of those esoteric bureaucratic disagreements if not for the extraordinary stakes involved. This year, 72 percent of Florida schools failed the federal standard. More than 500 of them have failed four years in a row, which begins to trigger a requirement that the schools be closed or restructured or taken over by the state. Already, such schools are docked money to pay for private tutors, and students are being invited to leave for better schools.

The problem will only get worse. By 2013-14, the federal law requires that 100 percent, or every single student in every single school, meet grade-level standards in reading, math and writing. Now 57 percent of all students and 39 percent of black students meet the reading standard.

The goals are not at issue. Schools in the past have too easily covered up the weak academic performance of poor or minority or disabled students by disclosing only school-wide test averages. No Child Left Behind forces them to focus on groups of students that have been neglected. The problem is in using one set of test results to issue nationwide, one-size-fits-all edicts about the classroom.

In Florida, for example, 712 of the schools the federal law deems as failing this year are in line to receive millions of dollars in bonuses from a state system that grades them with an A. How is a principal or a classroom teacher expected to reconcile these contradictions?

The governor notes that Florida's grading system looks beyond the bottom-line score to consider the improvement each student makes. That provision is a strength of the A+ grading system, because it helps to measure how well the school and its teachers are performing.

Much like the No Child Left Behind Act, though, the A+ Plan suffers from an inflexible and simplistic approach. The state Education Department has been so slavish about its grading formula that it has forced the closure of some experimental schools formed to work with students who were failing badly in traditional schools. How does that serve students? The $134-million "recognition" program continues to hand out bonuses to schools that accept only academically advanced students, and the two highest rated schools this year were for International Baccalaureate and gifted students. Is it any wonder they scored well on the test?

Standardized tests are an important tool of accountability, but they alone can't determine whether a classroom teacher needs a bonus or should be fired. If Gov. Bush is finally fed up with federal mandates that misuse the test, he might want to call is brother. Then he should ask teachers for their own thoughts about state mandates.

[Last modified June 18, 2006, 05:23:30]