Smarter Gauge of Progress

The landmark No Child Left Behind Act was born of rare bipartisan frustration over poor and minority children stuck in subpar schools.

Legislators’ ire was focused on the billions of federal dollars that had flowed to low- income students since passage of the 1965 Title I Education Act, without any apparent effect.

The thinking behind the new law, which just marked its second anniversary, was that schools must use Title I money to raise children’s skills and ambitions, not just to hire poorly trained classroom aides in what critics derided as a job-creation boondoggle.

Now that the law and its sanctions against supposedly failing schools are in place, the reality is more jarring.

Schools that are making progress are too often ranked as failures. Children with severe learning disabilities are forced into tests they can’t comprehend. States define marginal teachers as highly qualified.

Bipartisan support has devolved into political rancor, with some Democrats pushing a legislative agenda to weaken the law’s accountability measures, and the law’s advocates rejecting any change no matter how badly parts of it are working.

This won’t do. The law will fail unless its problems are fixed; children will fail if the law’s basic premise -- improving the achievement of all students -- is gutted.

Here are changes that would serve the law’s admirable aims:

* The law defines subgroups of students by ethnicity, poverty and learning disability. For the school to meet its goals, all subgroups must improve by a certain amount on every test. As a result, schools with more subgroups are far more likely to fail, according to a recent study by Policy Analysis for California Education. It’s a simple statistical truth: More groups to focus on means more ways to fail.

Other schools fail because not enough students in a group took the exam. Ninety-five percent of each subgroup must participate; just two students out sick from a class of 33 children would put it under that limit. Of the 3,000 California schools that fell short this year, a third raised scores among all groups but missed the 95% participation mark for one or two.

A better way: Let schools with large numbers of subgroups and strong overall progress off the hook if a group or two doesn’t improve one year in a single subject. Just don’t allow this to happen with the same subgroup year after year. And lower the participation rate to a more realistic 85%.

* Less-qualified teachers are clustered in inner-city schools; No Child Left Behind seeks to change that. The act requires a knowledgeable, well-trained teacher in every classroom. It also pushes to have the most qualified teachers assigned to the neediest schools.

So why is the Department of Education allowing many states to declare all their teachers qualified merely on the grounds that they’re already teaching?

California tried to take that route but changed direction under federal scrutiny. Indiana and other states got away with it. Although only about half of California teachers are listed as meeting the standard, Indiana lists 95% of its teachers as highly qualified, even in impoverished schools.

Stiffen the rules on qualified teachers. Make states come up with plans for moving more of those teachers to high-poverty schools, which need them most but are least likely to have them.

* Many special-education students cannot fathom standardized tests; some can’t even sit long enough to take them. The Education Department set a rigid rule that 99% of all students must use the standard test.

Parents of the learning-disabled often opt out of testing, considering it an exercise in frustration for their children. This results in the school failing the participation requirement.

A more reasonable rule would provide a special test for children who cannot function in a regular classroom without an aide.

* Level out the standards. The feds measure how many students are academically proficient, but permit states to define “proficient.”

California and South Carolina set high academic standards; Connecticut lowered its standards; and states such as Wyoming set theirs so low that they reported having few or no failing schools. That adds up to a lot of children left behind, even if their schools look good on paper.

Similarly, most states, including California, set such outlandish definitions for dangerous campuses that, nationwide, only 52 schools are listed as dangerous -- none of them in this state. This solves the sticky problem of students having the right to transfer out of crime-ridden schools but doesn’t make them safer.

Setting standards has always been a state job, but Washington should at least set a floor and reward states that set high expectations for students.

No one said putting No Child Left Behind into practice would be easy, and despite a recent promise of an extra $2 billion, President Bush continues to underfund the act. The measures to weaken the law stand little chance because many powerful Democrats, including California Rep. George Miller (D-Martinez), remain staunch supporters of it. But these measures do stand in the way of more constructive changes.