08/02/05–The U.S. Education Department is approving various changes in state accountability plans required under the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) in a closed-door, piecemeal fashion.
U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings announced several months ago that the department would issue guidelines giving states and school districts more flexibility. That hasn’t happened yet, and the department is continuing to approve amendments to states’ accountability plans on a case-by-case basis.
“As a result, it’s difficult for state and school district officials to know whether a particular change has been approved for other states,” says Reggie Felton, director of federal relations at NSBA. “It’s possible that the same change approved in one state could be rejected for another state.”
For example, the Education Department rejected Washington state’s request for more flexibility in how the test scores of students with disabilities are counted in calculating adequate yearly progress (AYP), but similar requests were approved for Georgia and Illinois.
“The slow pace at which the Education Department is responding to state requests for flexibility is making it difficult for school districts to plan for the coming school year,” Felton says. “States can’t release lists of schools in need of improvement if they don’t know if their accountability plans are approved.”
“And school boards can’t make plans for school choice or supplemental services if they don’t know which of their schools are on the state’s watch list,” he adds. “They could be blamed later for dragging their feet on notifying parents about these options, when it isn’t their fault.”
As an example of the types of changes approved, Florida was allowed to reduce its proficiency targets for determining whether students are making AYP. Before, 48 percent of a school’s students had to be proficient in reading for a school to make AYP; now it’s 37 percent. The proficiency target for math was reduced from 53 percent to 44 percent.
Georgia was allowed to add a certain number of points to the test scores of some students with disabilities, which resulted in far fewer schools listed as in need of improvement this year.
Under federal rules, 1 percent of students who take an alternative assessment count in a school’s AYP calculations. That means some students with disabilities who pass alternate assessments cannot have their scores counted toward meeting AYP.
Under the one-year flexibility agreement approved for the state July 14, the state was allowed to add 16 percent to the 2004-05 performance scores for students with disabilities, says Dana Tofig, a spokesperson for the Georgia Education Department. The change only applies to schools that didn’t achieve AYP only because of the test scores of that subgroup.
Tofig says 146 schools in Georgia missed their AYP targets solely because of the disabilities subgroup, and 65 of those schools now will be removed from that list because of the flexibility agreement.
The U.S. Education Department “made it clear to us that to attain flexibility we had to show progress for children with disabilities and we had to show dedication to NCLB,” Tofig says.
In changes approved for Illinois, the state was allowed to add 14 percent to the test scores of students with disabilities.
Illinois also was allowed to increase the N size of all of its subgroups -- including racial and ethnic minorities, economically disadvantaged students, and limited-English-proficient students -- from 40 to 45 students. The N size is the minimum number of students in a subgroup per school needed for AYP reporting purposes.
In another change approved for Illinois, a school district will only be determined to have failed to make AYP if all of its underlying grade spans -- 3 through 5, 6 through 8, and 9 through 12 -- failed to meet the testing targets. If any one grade span across the district makes AYP, the district as a whole will be considered to make AYP.
Test results of students enrolled in the district by May 1 but who move to another school within the district before the testing date will be reflected only in the district report, not the individual school report card.
Washington state’s request for more flexibility in the number of special education students’ test scores in calculating AYP was not approved, because “in exchange, we would have had to lower our N size” to 30 students for all subgroups, says Shirley Skidmore, a spokesperson for the state’s office of public instruction. Currently, the state’s N size is 40 for special education students and English language learners and 30 for other subgroups.
The U.S. Education Department did approve other changes for Washington: If schools and districts don’t reach their reading goals, they can now average their reading and writing scores to come up with a language arts goal. And school districts will move into improvement status only when they miss AYP in the same subject for two years in a row in all subjects tested.
NCLB requires high schools to report their graduation rates, and some schools in Washington, such as alternative high schools that only go up to the 10th or 11th grade, reported a graduation rate of zero. These schools can now use a dropout indicator. And if English language learners take five years to graduate, it won’t affect the district’s graduation rate.
The U.S. Education Department is addressing each state’s issues individually because “every state came into this at a different level,” says spokesperson Chad Colby. “Some states already had assessment systems in place before NCLB and other didn’t.”
Jack Jennings, president of the Center on Education Policy, says the Education Department’s practice of “negotiating one-on-one with each state in a semi-secret manner is not a good policy. It should be a transparent, open process.”
It raises questions on whether there are political motives behind the Education Department’s decisions to approve or reject certain state requests, he says. “States are wondering why another state got a better deal.”
Jennings also speculates that Spellings is appearing more open to flexibility “to blunt the opposition to NCLB, to deflect more laws like the one in Utah, and the lawsuits [charging NCLB is an underfunded mandate] so the law will be less open to amendment.”