FEDERAL education secretary Margaret Spellings is trying to pump life into the controversial No Child Left Behind law. Passed in 2002, the law needs to be reauthorized. But Congress is stalling on whether and how to retool the law until after the election. So to make some progress, Spellings is promoting new regulations.
The premise of her proposed rules is that education still needs more transparency.
One helpful proposal would require all states to use the same method to calculate high school graduation rates, and not hide dropouts behind statistical disguises.
Another rule would require schools to be more transparent about their "subgroups" - the limited-English, disabled, minority, and other students who don't always show up in states' calculations of their "adequate yearly progress," because states deem these students to be too few in number to be statistically significant. The proposed regulations say states should reveal who is counted, who isn't, and why. (Massachusetts sets its minimum subgroup size at 40 - above the national average of 30. So in some schools, subgroup scores for disabled or minority students aren't calculated.)
It's no surprise that Spellings wants more accountability, but she's also calling for more creativity. Asked what she would do if she could wave a magic wand over the nation's schools, she told Globe editors and writers last week that she would devise "customized ways to get kids out of high school." This could include appealing innovations, such as extending instructional time, weaving jobs into the curriculum, and letting qualified high school seniors take courses at nearby colleges. Hers is a spirited cry for schools to staunch the annual flood of high school dropouts, over a million a year.
Missing, however, is money. Shedding the light of day on more schools, as Spellings wants, could well expose problems and prompt solutions. But the old lament about No Child Left Behind remains true: The law has never had enough federal funding to revolutionize schools.
The goal of No Child Left Behind is modest: to get children achieving at grade level by 2014. Spellings is nudging, but real progress will have to come from Congress and the current or next president.
