leave NCLB?
Brent Finnegan -- March 18th, 2008
A headline in today’s Winchester Star raises the question: Should Virginia withdraw from No Child Left Behind?
We’ve written here before about the conflict between the Harrisonburg School Board and the federal Department of Education over the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) testing standards for students. That’s one of the reasons Virginia educators want out of the program. But there’s more than $350 million in federal funds at stake.
From the Star:
Virginia lawmakers have been grappling with the idea of withdrawing from the federal No Child Left Behind Act.
A compromise measure — asking the Virginia Board of Education to study whether the state should leave the program that requires schools to show yearly progress among students — cleared the General Assembly this month [...]
Instead of recommending withdrawal, the General Assembly’s compromise ultimately leaves it to the state Board of Education to make a recommendation.
Yet, Kellison said, the lawmakers’ actions show that they believe NCLB may need some changes.
In Virginia, school officials have complained that missing just one of the many NCLB “success indicators” can make a school look like a failure.
“The accountability design, by the way it’s structured, increasingly creates the appearance of failure when schools … are likely performing at exceptionally high levels,” said Frederick County Schools Superintendent Patricia Taylor.
Another concern is that the tests used to assess student achievement vary from state to state. Virginia’s Standards of Learning tests are nationally recognized for being rigorous, while other states could give the appearance of high performance by offering less-rigorous tests.
In addition, one student’s test scores could count up to four times in the NCLB assessment if that child is a minority, speaks English as a second language, comes from a low-income family, and has a learning disability.
Last year, City Schools Superintendent Don Ford said Harrisonburg schools received $4.9 million dollars in federal funds for the 2006 – 2007 budget.
Here’s a poem about NCLB.