Are Minority Students Slipping Through NCLB Loopholes?

Every school year brings public schools closer to 2014—the year when all public school students must be able to demonstrate proficiency in reading and math, as assessed by standardized achievement tests. Schools receiving federal Title I funds also must demonstrate that students in targeted subgroups are making adequate yearly progress (AYP) towards the 2014 proficiency goal. If even one subgroup does not meet AYP, the whole school can face penalties.

Demonstrating annual progress and ultimately reaching 100 percent proficiency is more difficult for some schools and districts than others. Schools and districts with greater diversity in terms of race/ethnicity, income, disability status, and languages spoken must demonstrate improvement for multiple groups. The recent Center for Education Policy report, “From the Capital to the Classroom: Year 4 of the No Child Left Behind Act," described the challenges some urban districts are facing in trying to meet AYP for up to 10 subgroups.

In an effort to work with states encountering obstacles, the Department of Education (ED) has been offering states increased flexibility in their testing plans and in their calculation of AYP. A February report from the Harvard Civil Rights Project details the exemptions given to various states by ED and concludes that the wide variation among state accountability plans is putting the legitimacy of NCLB in jeopardy. A recent analysis by the Associated Press (AP) offers further evidence of the unintended consequences of deal making between ED and the states.

Omission of Minority Test Scores

AP applied current racial category exemptions being used by the states to 2003-2004 enrollment data, the latest available. Their computer analysis uncovered that ED’s compromises on state accountability plans have resulted in the exclusion of nearly 2 million minority students’ test scores. Schools have always been able to exclude the scores of students from subgroups too small for statistically significant results. A surge of successful petitions for additional exemptions by almost two dozen states led AP to conclude that schools appear to be excluding scores for another reason: to reduce their chances of being labeled “in need of improvement” and potentially facing federal sanctions. Students being left out, according to AP, include Hispanics learning English in California, blacks in the Chicago suburbs, American Indians in the Northwest, and special education students in Virginia. Although ED claimed not to know to what extent states were underreporting test scores, Education Secretary Margaret Spellings said she will pay attention to the problem during the law’s renewal next year and during current reviews of state education plans.

Encouraging Segregation?

Some state education leaders have voiced concerns that NCLB may have the unintended consequence of encouraging the exclusion of not only minority students’ test scores, but also the exclusion of minority students themselves from certain schools. Suburban schools with a largely white and middle to high-income student population may be exhibiting a reluctance to diversify for fear of not meeting AYP.

Connecticut, still the defendant in a long-running desegregation lawsuit, provides a case study of NCLB’s effect on efforts to desegregate schools. Betty Sternberg, the state’s education commissioner, is tasked with the role of integrating the schools that serve mostly poor and minority students with the first-rate schools educating wealthy white students. She explains, “We’ve had reluctance on the part of school districts to accept youngsters who come in with deficiencies because they’re concerned that if they get enough of them . . . they’ll become labeled as failing schools.”

In Illinois, students moving from inadequate inner city schools to suburban schools often face resentment, according to Barbara Radner, director of DePaul University’s Center for Urban Education. The fear is that by increasing the economic and racial diversity of the school, the school will be at greater risk of failure to meet AYP. In addition, school administrators and parents fear that students at academic risk based on the poor conditions of their previous school will drag down the school’s ranking, according to Radner.

A great strength of NCLB is its requirement that achievement test score data be disaggregated to ensure that schools are educating all children to a high standard. Now that unintended consequences of this have come to light, it is essential that these problems be addressed during next year’s reauthorization process. Recent innovations to NCLB, such as the growth model pilot, might be a first step towards improvement of the law.

Prepared by Elisabeth Thurston, April 26, 2006