Rothstein offers an excellent critique of the Leave No Child Behind Act.
You have to make a choice. Either you leave standards to the states and allow them to measure themselves or you institute standards nationwide. If you do it half-way, you create an incentive for low standards.
USA Today lists the number of failing schools by state that have to allow transfers to better schools. This isn’t really true because there isn’t enough room in other schools in the same district. But it sounds nice.
Here is a Rand Report on test scores over time to compare states.
Montana has more failing schools than does Missouri. Controlling for population that looks strange doesn’t it? Of course, it could be that Missouri has better students, right? Wrong, Montana does pretty good on nationally normed test compared to Missouri. So how are there more failing schools? Montana tries harder..
As Rothstein points out, even if you measure the same way, states performance is based on what their goals are. Arkansas has 0 failing schools? ROTFL….sure. Louisiana has 24? New Orleans itself should have 24 let alone the whole damn state.
Michigan has 1500? Michigan isn’t at the head of the pack, but it isn’t that bad. It is above average according to the Dept of Ed.
What does this mean for the future of education reform? Given state funding is dependent on this, states have every incentive to lower their standards. So it isn’t going to leave no child behind, it is going to leave every state behind.
One might also notice that Vermont and Iowa do better than the national average. Dean is pointing this out and how much it is going to cost states that have been effective in education in the past. It is a critical point.
A hell of an education president.