State’s ‘No Child’ Proposal Rejected

By Zsombor Peter Journal Staff Writer

New Mexico schools will have to keep waiting if they want their students’ year-to-year gains to help pull them off the state’s troubled list.

The U.S. Education Department has rejected the state’s proposal to use those gains as an alternative way of assessing its schools.

Called a growth-based model, it would have let the state look at three consecutive years of scores on the state’s annual reading and math tests. If a school showed enough improvement, as determined by the state, it would pass.

It was an attempt to address one of the most common complaints about the No Child Left Behind Act: No matter how much improvement a school has made from year to year, it’s still considered a failure if a predetermined number of students aren’t proficient.

The law does have a “safe harbor” provision for schools that haven’t met that number. The provision lets them go back a year and show that at least 10 percent of students have progressed from nonproficient to proficient, said Carlos Martinez, a state Public Education Department associate secretary.

But, for many, NCLB critics, that doesn’t go far enough.

New Mexico proposed making the harbor bigger. Its plan would have kicked in if a school failed to make adequate yearly progress even under the safe harbor provision.

The plan wouldn’t just help schools avoid — or get off of — the state’s corrective action list, which demands increasingly severe changes for every year they fail to make adequate progress. It would also give schools a greater incentive to work with the lowest performing students.

Because of NCLB’s singleminded interest in the number of proficient students over how much they’ve improved, critics say the law pushes schools to focus disproportionately on students who are already near proficient.

The U.S. Education Department praised the state’s proposal for focusing on lower performing students and called the plan unique and innovative. But according to its rejection letter, the department was also concerned about the lack of a clear mechanism for reporting results to parents and the public.

The state can try submitting a revised plan in the fall, but Martinez said there are a few fundamental problems: High poverty and low population density. High poverty tends to make students more mobile, and low density tends to make for smaller classes. Together, he said, they make it hard to collect three years of adequate data at any given school.

“Frankly,” he said, “I’m not very optimistic.”

(c) 2008 Albuquerque Journal. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved.