http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/27/opinion/27mon4.html?th&emc=th
from the NY Times
Published: June 27, 2005
Americans often can’t find reliable information about how the schools in their state compare with schools elsewhere. The No Child Left Behind Act was supposed to change that by requiring states to file clear and accurate statistical information with the Education Department. The news so far is less than encouraging. Many states have chosen to manipulate data to provide overly optimistic appraisals of their schools’ performance.
A distressing example emerged last week in a study of graduation rates by the Education Trust, a nonpartisan foundation in Washington. For the second year in a row, the Education Trust has found that many states are cooking the books on graduation rates - using unorthodox calculation methods or ignoring students who drop out. Some states submitted no graduation data at all.
The generally accepted way to calculate graduation rates is to track students from the day they enter high school until the day they receive a regular diploma, as opposed to passing the G.E.D. Under this system, students who leave without graduating are reasonably counted as nongraduates.
But many of the states are using other, deceptive techniques. Some calculate the percentage of dropouts based on the number of students in a given senior class who graduate. Those who left school in grades 9, 10 or 11 disappear, and the graduation rates reported by many of the states are grossly inflated.
The secretary of education, Margaret Spellings, says she is concerned about accuracy. But Congress itself needs to take up this issue and force the states to use accurate methods of calculation when it reauthorizes No Child Left Behind in 2007. Until changes are made at the federal level, student performance data in the United States won’t be worth the paper it’s printed on.
Nice to see somebody finally put this in print. I was speaking to a mother the other day. She told me her daughter passed our state 8th grade math test, but private individual testing shows she is at a 5th grade level. “Passing the state test” means next to nothing in terms of being “on grade level”.
On the other hand, the test is killing kids who are LD in reading.
Janis