441 WAYS TO FAIL

The federal education reform that is supposed to clarify whether schools are performing well offers so many interesting ways for good schools to fail that states will spend the next several years trying to explain why in the muddled matrix of test scores, graduation and participation rates so many schools are considered failures. Maine has anticipated this, but it has the additional job of informing federal regulators which of their rules don’t work very well.

No Child Left Behind sounds simple: Either a school makes adequate progress in reading and math, or after two consecutive years of a lack of progress, parents are told they can move their children elsewhere. Parents should know, however, that they could only move to another public school within their own district, which in Maine’s case for high schools is a problem – only Portland’s district has more than one public high school.

But that’s the easy part. The complication is this: For now, seven subcategories of students in three grades (four, eight and 11) will be tested in two subjects and be held to standards for participation, attendance and graduation rates. Following this, grades three, five, six and seven will be added, and in ’06, science progress will also count. The Maine Education Department figures each school has 441 possible ways to fail and that it is inevitable that almost all of them will eventually.

“Fail” isn’t a word the U.S. Department of Education wants to use – schools that don’t meet standards under NCLB are called priority schools, although how a large majority can also be a priority would strain the reading comprehension portion of the test. Maine is expected to release its first set of test results in a couple weeks and expects considerably more schools to fall into the priority category than have so far. Other states have completed their scoring and are not encouraged. In Florida, 87 percent of schools failed; in California, 45 percent failed.

The challenge for Maine under what ought to be called No Calculation Left Behind is how to explain that a school that has consecutive failures in participation for a subgroup of students should not be in the same category as a school with numerous failures in reading and math in multiple grades. One tempting way this can be made readily understandable is if the public is told to ignore the results until further failure results in a draconian penalty.

The lack of real school choice for students in priority schools reveals NCLB for what it is – a way to address persistent shortcomings in urban schools that no doubt need repair. But the federal reform affects all schools, and already Maine has decided to add end-of-year tests because local assessments for the Maine Learning Results would not be ready on time for many schools. It has also added confidence intervals for small school testing results and a safe harbor provision that gives schools making adequate progress with at least 10 percent of a subgroup to be considered passing.

But it also has more to do, such as persuading the federal government to re-examine how it evaluates the scores of each subgroup and whether the failure of a single one of the 441 standards ought to result in priority listing. It should take into account student mobility – a large number of newly transferred students who perform poorly shouldn’t be blamed on their new school. And it should protect school curriculum that is not directly measured by the tests – perhaps with a minimum-effort provision.

So much work and, still, so many ways to fail.