NCLB Mythbusting

I love the Discovery Channel show Mythbusters, it is funny, filled with interesting experiments and some pretty outrageous myths. D-ed Reckoning's Ken DeRosa should be accorded the title of Education Mythbuster. Ken has another take down of yet another NCLB myth, that schools that are actually achieving are still be labeled as failing schools. Ken looks at this article on the NCLB reauthorization from the San Diego Union Tribune, and after some preliminaries, gets down to brass tacks:

Then we get the only evidence cited to support the premise:

Many public school administrators, board members and teachers say the federal system, unlike the state accountability system in California, fails to recognize school progress over time. No Child Left Behind, they say, unfairly labels many schools as failures – no matter how much they are improving from year to year, or how close they are to meeting federal benchmarks.

NCLB does in fact recognize progress. NCLB contains a Safe Harbor provision that permits a school that is, in fact, failing to avoid the "failing label" if it reduces its percentage of students not meeting standards by 10% of the previous year's percentage.

I fail to see how this is unfair. If you are not meeting your state's pass rate and aren't improving sufficiently to fall within the safe harbor, you are failing regardless if you miss that mark by 30% or 0.01%. This isn't horseshoes or hand grenades. Near misses don't count.

So to sum up: NCLB does, in fact, recognize "school progress over time."

One thing that Ken leaves out is that NCLB allows the states to define what is passing and what is not. There is no single national passing standard, there are 51, some of which are almost laughable in their lack of stringency. Fifth grade reading skill is not defined in the same way from state to state, which might mean that fifth grade reading in one state might equate to third grade reading in a more stringent state--which might itself define fifth grade reading the same as the federal governemnt does.