It’s very disappointing — but all too predictable, unfortunately — that the Chronicle‘s editors don’t get it, regarding TEA head Shirley Neeley’s decision to ignore one requirement of the No Child Left Behind act.
Here’s an analogy: during the Dan Rather faked memos mess, the editors told us that all media should not be tainted with Dan Rather’s “sins”:
Conservative critics of the mainstream news media will attempt to tar the daily press, as well as ABC and NBC, with CBS’s sins. The network’s unprofessional behavior draws attention to the three broadcast networks’ loss of audience and prestige, but CBS blundered on its own.
Along that same line, Neeley has decided not to tar all Texas schools with artificial failures because of an unreasonable NCLB regulation, as one of the Chronicle‘s own letters to the editor points out today (do the editors read the letters?):
The No Child Left Behind Act, though well-intentioned, is a severely flawed and punitive piece of legislation that effectively smothers schools already on life support. Its greatest flaw is that it assumes that all schools are exactly the same when they aren’t.
Statistically, poorer schools tend to have greater numbers of special-needs students.
My middle school is considered a poor school, and our special-education population is more than 25 percent.
According to NCLB, 99 percent of those students must take on-level tests or be counted as automatic failures.
We are judged on the same scale as more affluent schools with much smaller special-education populations.
What NCLB has done is put poor schools in a no-win situation.
If we look out for our students’ best interests, federal funding is jeopardized. If we comply with the mandates of NCLB, we compromise our commitment to special-education students. But regardless of noble intentions and herculean effort, we cannot arbitrarily qualify special-needs students to take on-level tests just to make some bureaucrats in Washington happy.
The feds have said that no more that one percent of a school’s students can take the alternative skills test developed for special education students. It’s an unfairly low number. Poorer schools DO tend to have larger special education student populations. Therefore the entire rating of a school district is labeled as failing or needing improvement, only because more than one percent of special education students took the alternate test and must be considered automatic failures, even if they passed the test.
It’s ludicrous. And frankly, it’s bewildering that the editors appear not to understand it. I am often critical of public education, and yet I understand what’s going on here. It goes back to what I said previously: the Chronicle needs to find an education expert so it can speak intelligently on issues relating to public education.
As Callie Markantonis asked the other day, how many passes will the editors grant the sacred cow known as Metro, while the editors seem to willfully misstate and misunderstand what’s going on at HISD?
