2 million scores ignored in ‘No Child’ loophole

Hundreds of thousands
In all, the tests of more than 24,000 mostly minority children in Missouri aren’t being counted as groups, AP’s review found. Other states have much higher numbers. California, for instance, isn’t counting the scores of more than 400,000 children. In Texas, the total is about 257,000.

State educators defend the exemptions, saying minority students’ performance is still being included in their schools’ overall statistics even when they aren’t being counted in racial categories.

Scott Palmer, a consultant for the Council of Chief State School Officers in Washington, said he hoped critics will focus on the 23 million children whose scores are being counted by schools rather than those whose scores aren’t reported separately.

“There’s a huge positive feeling for the notion” of making schools accountable, Palmer said. “It’s a huge plus.”

Spellings said she believes educators are acting in good faith. “Are there people out there who find ways to game the system? Of course,” she said. “But on the whole ... I fully believe in my heart, mind and soul that educators are people of good will.”

States get exemption
Bush has hailed the separate accounting of minority students as a vital feature of the law. “It’s really essential we do that. It’s really important,” Bush said in a May 2004 speech. “If you don’t do that, you’re likely to leave people behind. And that’s not right.”

Nonetheless, Bush’s Education Department continues to give widely varying exemptions to states:

• Oklahoma lets schools exclude the test scores from any racial category with 52 or fewer members in the testing population, one of the largest across-the-board exemptions. That means 1 in 5 children in the state don’t have scores broken out by race.
• Maryland, which tests about 150,000 students more than Oklahoma, has an exempt group size of just five. That means fewer than 1 in 100 don’t have scores counted.
• With one of the most diverse school populations in the nation, Florida has been allowed to create a special “provisional,” or probationary, category for schools that are failing to meet the law’s requirements. The deal helped reduce the number of failing Florida schools from 73 percent in 2003 to 37 percent in 2004.
• Washington state has made 18 changes to its testing plan, according to a February report by the Harvard Civil Rights Project. Vermont has made none. On average, states have made eight changes at either the state or federal level to their plans in the past five years, usually changing the size or accountability of subgroups whose scores were supposed to be counted.

Toia Jones, a black teacher whose daughters attend school in a mostly white Chicago suburb, said the loophole is enabling states and schools to avoid taking concrete measures to eliminate an “achievement gap” between white and minority students.

“With this loophole, it’s almost like giving someone a trick bag to get out of a hole,” she said. “Now people, instead of figuring out how do we really solve it, some districts, in order to save face or in order to not be faced with the sanctions, they’re doing what they can to manipulate the data.”

‘We're part of America’
Some students feel left behind, too. “It’s terrible,” said Michael Oshinaya, a senior at Eleanor Roosevelt High School in New York City who was among a group of black students whose scores weren’t broken out as a racial category. “We’re part of America. We make up America, too. We should be counted as part of America.”

Spelling’s Education Department is caught between two forces. Schools and states are eager to avoid the stigma of failure under the law, especially as the 2014 deadline draws closer. But Congress has shown little political will to modify the law to address their concerns. That leaves the racial category exemptions as a stopgap solution.

“She’s inherited a disaster,” said David Shreve, an education policy analyst for the National Conference of State Legislatures. “The ’Let’s Make a Deal’ policy is to save the law from fundamental changes, with Margaret Spellings as Monte Hall.”

Single-standard solution?
The solution may be to set a single federal standard for when minority students’ scores don’t have to be counted separately, said Ross Wiener, policy director for the Washington-based Education Trust.

The law originally created the exemptions to make sure schools didn’t unfairly fail schools or compromise student privacy when they had just a small number of students in one racial category, Wiener said.

But there’s little doubt now that group sizes have become political, said Wiener, whose group supports the law.

“They’re asking the question, not how do we generate statistically reliable results, but how do we generate politically palatable results,” he said.

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