Hearing on No Child Left Behind Concentrates on How Law Can Be Improved
WASHINGTON, Sept. 29 – The Department of Education is considering granting states more flexibility in testing under the No Child Left Behind act, Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings told a House panel Thursday.
Testifying in front of the House education committee, Spellings said the department is working with states who want to create different testing standards for students with disabilities – for instance, giving them more time to complete the tests.
The secretary also said that school districts that have taken in displaced students from the Gulf Coast will be allowed to report evaluations of those students separately from their main body of students.
The No Child Left Behind law, passed in 2002, requires that states test students annually and meet federally-mandated progress standards.
Committee members expressed concern that allowing different testing standards for students with disabilities might cause them to be left out of the process all together.
The department also is considering a system where schools will be given credit for improvement over time, even if their improvement in a given year isn’t sufficient to remove the school’s ‘needs improvement’ designation, Spellings said.
While she spoke of the importance of greater flexibility in the way the law is implemented, Spellings defended the law’s core goals. She reiterated her commitment to the goal of 100 percent proficiency by 2014.
“That really is not too much to ask of our country and our children,” Spellings said.
She said schools have seen a more dramatic improvement in the last five years than they did over the previous 30, especially for minority students.
“We have created an appetite for results,” she said.
Lawmakers also expressed concerns about the state of America’s high schools. While Spellings said that there has been rapid improvement in schools since the law was implemented, she acknowledged that improvement has occurred mainly at the elementary education level.
Spellings said one of the problems is that the data on what needs improvement in high schools isn’t available. “We’re doing a lot of guessing about what’s wrong in high school,” she said.
She also said she was concerned about the number of high-school drop-outs, estimating that there are one million every year. It costs the country money in lost taxes and, “it also represents the American Dream denied for many people,” she said.
Committee Chairman John Boehner (R-Ohio) said that the dropouts are the symptom of earlier problems. “We don’t lose them in high school,” he said. “We lose them in grades one through three when the fire of learning is not lit.”
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