Bush moves ahead on No Child Left Behind
New provisions target dropouts, minority students
WASHINGTON - The Bush administration sought to bolster its signature education law yesterday, announcing new rules designed to address the nation's dropout problem and ensure close attention is paid to the achievement of minority students.
Education Secretary Margaret Spellings announced that among the proposed changes to the No Child Left Behind law is a requirement that all states, by the 2012-13 school year, calculate their graduation rates in a uniform way.
States use all kinds of methods to determine their graduation rates, many of which are based on unreliable information about school dropouts, leading to overestimates.
States would be told to count graduates as students who leave on time and with a regular degree. Research indicates students who take extra time or get alternatives to diplomas, such as a GED, generally don't do as well in college or in the workforce.
States would still be able to set their own goals for getting more students to graduate.
The administration's proposed regulations would require schools to be judged not only on how the overall student body does but also on the percentage of minority students who graduate.
Nationally, an estimated 70 percent of students graduate on time with a regular diploma. For Hispanic and black students, the proportion drops to about half.
Critics of the six-year-old education law have complained that judging schools on test scores but not, to the same degree, on graduation rates has created an incentive for schools to push weak students into nondiploma tracks.
No Child Left Behind requires testing in reading and math in grades 3 through 8 and once in high school. The stated goal is to get all children doing math and reading at their proper grade level by 2013-14.
Spellings has been taking steps in recent months to make changes to the law, after efforts to rewrite the bill in Congress stalled. The proposed regulations amount to the most comprehensive set of administrative changes she has sought so far.
The regulations call for a federal review of state policies regarding the exclusion of test scores of students in racial groups deemed too small to be statistically significant or so small that student privacy could be jeopardized.
The regulations also call for school districts to demonstrate that they are doing all they can to notify parents of low-income students in struggling schools that free tutoring is available. If the districts fail to do that, their ability to spend federal funds could be limited. The department estimates that only 14 percent of eligible students receive the free tutoring.
An even smaller percentage of children who are allowed to transfer to higher-performing schools make that switch, in part because they aren't always informed of vacancies on time. The regulations would require schools to publicize open spots at least 14 days before school starts.
President Bush the regulations would "address the dropout crisis in America, strengthen accountability, improve our lowest-performing schools, and ensure that more students get access to high-quality tutoring."
