List of 'failing' schools grows due to unrealistic education standards

Tuesday, August 18, 2009 12:16 AM PDT

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Aug. 18 Daily News editorial

Five years ago, Kelso School District Superintendent Glenys Hill gave voice to a fear shared by many public school officials here and around the nation. Absent meaningful changes in the federal No Child Left Behind law, Hill said, “we will all be failing districts.”

The Kelso superintendent’s concern seems validated by the fast-growing number of schools in the state failing to make “Adequate Yearly Progress” under NCLB. Last year, 618 schools in the state were listed as needing improvement. With the release the latest Washington Assessment of Student Learning results last week, the number of “failing” schools jumped to 1,073. In Longview, 11 schools missed the federal law’s benchmarks for yearly progress.

The new numbers drew a sharp response from state Superintendent of Public Instruction Randy Dorn. “Our state testing scores are flat, yet the federal system shows an additional 500 schools are failing," Dorn said last week in a press release. "What is failing is No Child Left Behind. The law is completely unfair. While we know there is certainly room for improvement in our schools, it’s a statistical guarantee in this that all of our schools will soon be in federal improvement status. That’s unrealistic.”

Dorn’s right. The still largely uncompromising, one-size-fits-all nature of this 2002 federal education law makes failure a near certainty. Students with learning disabilities and those still learning English are required to meet much the same performance standards as all other students. Schools are considered failing if they don’t make what the law determines to be adequate yearly progress for two straight years in any of some three dozen categories.

Achieving the law’s benchmarks for improvement can be particularly difficult for states such as Washington, were the educational bar has been set very high. The federal law lets each state devise the test used to track student performance. Washington’s ambitious. This state has established what may be highest K-12 standards in the nation. The WASL tests used to measure student performance certainly are among the most demanding in the nation. In this respect, NCLB is unfair. It effectively gives a pass to states such as Texas, where the bar is lower and tests are much easier.

Almost to a person, educators here and around the nation praise the goals of this federal law. And, to be fair, federal education officials have tried to make NCLB more workable. More is being done, for example, to give at-risk students the free tutoring they need to succeed — though mostly at the expense of local districts. Much more needs to be done to both help pay for this federal mandate and make it more flexible. The law’s demands remain too rigid. Schools are allowed little margin for error, and the penalties for failure are significant.

The ballooning numbers of “failing” schools in Washington — a state with very high K-12 standards — ought to serve as a wake-up call for federal education officials. NCLB needs more work.