Education Standards

The New York Times has an article about President Bush’s “No Child Left Behind” law passed in 2002. The law requires states to administer standardized tests to the states’ public school students to measure a student’s proficiency in various academic areas. If schools do not meet passing standards Federal money can be withheld from the states and local school systems.

Many states, including Texas, are realizing that they will not be able to meet their own standards and are now lowering the passing standards to insure that they meet the law’s requirements. The “No Child Left Behind” law allows states to set their own passing standards, which completely destroys the credibility of the program. Any state can change the passing standard at their will, which will essentially allow states to gerrymander the test scores as evidenced by the following quotes.

Fearing that thousands of students would fail the new test and be held back a grade, and that hundreds of schools could face penalties under the federal No Child Left Behind law, the board voted to reduce the number of questions that students must answer correctly to pass it, to 20 out of 36, from 24, for third-grade reading.

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Michigan’s standards had been among the nation’s highest, which caused problems last year when 1,513 schools there were labeled under the law as needing improvement, more than in any other state. So Michigan officials lowered the percentage of students who must pass statewide tests to certify a school as making adequate progress ? to 42 percent, from 75 percent of high school students on English tests, for example. That reduced the number of schools so labeled to 216.

Colorado employed another tactic that will result in fewer schools being labeled as needing improvement. It overhauled the grading system used on its tests, lumping students previously characterized on the basis of test scores as “partially proficient” with those called “proficient.”