There are many ways that states, schools, and districts can work to "beat" No Child Left Behind. Some states back-end their adequate yearly progress benchmarks so that the greatest increases in achievement will be required in the last few years of implementation (see "Adequate yearly progress or balloon mortgage?" for more details). Others fudge their numbers so that, on paper, it appears that they have the requisite number of highly qualified teachers (see http://www.edexcellence.net/gadfly/issue.cfm?issue=120#1506). Now, it seems that Illinois schools have found two new ways to beat the system. Several of them have barred large numbers of their lowest-performing juniors from taking the state-mandated 11th grade test. To be sure, state law requires all juniors to take the Prairie State Achievement Exam, but the state also allows individual high schools to define what it means to be a "junior." Consequently, some suburban schools have replaced the old definition (third year of high school) with a new one: a third-year student who has earned enough credits to be on track to graduate in four years. The effect? Three suburban schools in Cook County "disqualified nearly 20 percent of the junior class from testing this year." Lo and behold, many of them are low-performing students who might have hampered the schools' adequate yearly progress calculations. What's more, the state itself discarded the tests of nearly 80,000 students who weren't registered for school as of September 30, 2003--a move that one analyst suggests may have inflated the scores of 1,400 schools. Both practices recall the old Mayor Daley trick of registering dead voters, only in reverse.
"Underachievers barred from tests," by Tracy Dell'Angela, Chicago Tribune, December 20, 2003 (registration required)
"Thousands of exams tossed out by state," by Diane Rado, Stephanie Banchero, and Darnell Little, Chicago Tribune, December 28, 2003 (registration required)