Good News and Bad News for Back to School
Good News and Bad News for Back to School
By Jon Kyl
As students across Arizona and the rest of the nation start heading back to school, their future in our educational system is mixed.
First, the bad news: As the Arizona Republic reported in late July, "For the fourth year in a row, Arizona ranks last among the states for its percentage of teens, ages 16 to 19, who have dropped out of school."Based on 2003 census data compiled by the Annie E. Casey Foundation, Arizona's dropout rate is 12 percent, compared to the national average of 8 percent.
The good news is that Arizona has improved significantly from the 1998 dropout rate of 17 percent. And nationally, another study has found the "achievement gap" between whites and minorities to be narrowing significantly among younger children.
The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) has tested 9-, 13-, and 17-year-old students in reading and mathematics since the early 1970s. It is often referred to as "the nation's report card." It found that the gap last year between 9-year-old white and black students on a 0-500 scale had dropped to 26 points, down from 41 in 1971. Better yet, both groups have been improving: since 1999, whites gained 5 points in reading, while African-Americans gained 14. Meanwhile, math scores for white, Hispanic and black 9- and 13-year-olds were all at record levels, and reading score trends were similar.
Unfortunately, the data showed little progress among older children. For 17-year-olds, test results have remained static across the board for three decades.
The NAEP results, in the words of the Lexington Institute think tank, are "an early indication that increased accountability for results" embodied by President Bush's signature No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) "is beginning to work." But much remains to be done to instill a broad culture of accountability in America's public education system.
For decades, states have failed to effectively measure, much less achieve, academic progress, but continued to receive tens of billions in federal funding anyway. When President Bush first took office, just 11 states were in compliance with previous law. Some states and school districts hid their failure to educate certain racial and ethnic groups by reporting only the "average" test score of a given school. Others simply avoided collecting or reporting the performance data at all.
For far too long money has flowed from the federal government to the states with no questions asked, while millions of mostly poor and minority students have been pushed through bad schools and left to fend for themselves in the workforce.
One of the major objectives of the NCLB Act was to change all that - to bring all students to proficiency in reading and math by the year 2014 by preventing such statistical sleights of hand from masking real problems. The law requires states to test annually in grades three through eight, to break down the results according to race, income, language and disability status, and to publicize the findings. Students in failing schools can transfer and/or receive tutoring from outside the school system.
The NCLB act's critics in the educational establishment have assailed it on a number of fronts, calling it an "unfunded mandate" (though its provisions are voluntary), "draconian," and so forth. They have also made the point that annual testing is an imperfect measure of overall student performance, which holds some truth. But these tests are developed by the states, not the federal government; and such tests are the best instrument available to identify areas of failure and progress and assign a measure of accountability that has been lacking. Whatever its limitations, NCLB represented a bipartisan consensus that the status quo is no longer acceptable, and that federal funding should be accompanied by higher standards and more responsibility for results. And it's working.
http://kyl.senate.gov/record.cfm?id=245044