I moved out of a “Program Improvement” district (not a good rating to have) in California. Now California only had 50% of fourth graders proficient in Language Arts according to the posting on the US Department of Education website. (http://www.ed.gov/nclb/accountability/results/progress/ca.htm) You can go to this site and check out your own state.
Anyway, I moved to a district doing very well in Tennessee. Now, Tennessee had 88% of fourth graders rated proficient according to the same site. Wow!
Did you know that Tennessee only requires a student to get between 32% and 38% of the answers correct on the state test to be rated “Proficient”? California requires between 68% and 72% on its state test to get the same rating. Did you know that kind of discrepancy existed? I didn’t.
This begs the question, how can we say that one state, which has very few districts and schools in “School Improvement” and “Corrective Action”, its version of Program Improvement, is performing better than California, which is overwhelmed by “under-performing” schools. With proficiency levels so far apart from each other, how does Spellings decide who needs sanctions and who doesn’t? I am not saying one is better than the other, I am just surprised by the differences and the questions those differences bring to mind.
Who is being left behind? How many? Are there more discrepancies between other states? I don’t know the answers yet, but I am interested in looking into that. If others have you have information to share, please comment here. Together we might be able to bring more to the surface, so we all know more fully what No Child Left Behind means.
-Ted Murcray
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