Conventional wisdom in Washington, circa 2001, was that states and schools were not to be trusted. Give them an inch, they'll take a mile--that was the sentiment when it came to devising NCLB's accountability system. We all knew that devious states would try to game the system and make schools look better than they really were, and that schools themselves would find loopholes and abuse them. So NCLB's crafters tried to preempt any shenanigans with a web of rules that would snare nefarious attempts to maintain the "soft bigotry of low expectations."
Worried that schools would keep poor performers home on test day? Require that 95 percent of all students (and all students in each subgroup) take the test. Concerned that schools would push poor performers into the "special education" category? Require children with disabilities to take the test too, and even mandate that their scores be evaluated as a separate subgroup under the law. Nervous that schools would obsess only about test score results and nothing else? Require states to add another indicator--typically attendance--to their accountability metrics.
Now, this attitude wasn't entirely out of line. We've seen plenty of shenanigans despite the best efforts of the Potomac Club--states that are keeping their standards low, schools that are focusing only on the bubble kids.
Still, this adversarial attitude intersects inevitably with the law of unintended consequences. Exhibit A is the Stephen Knolls School in Montgomery County, Maryland, the subject of this fantastic front-page Washington Post article by Dan de Vise.
Stephen Knolls School suffered the ignominy of failure under federal law in 2006 and 2007 for low test scores. This year, the Kensington school finally made the grade in reading and math--only to be sanctioned for poor attendance.
The challenge in this case is not truancy. Stephen Knolls serves medically fragile children with severe physical and cognitive disabilities, such as cerebral palsy, spina bifida and Rett syndrome.
Couldn't the state have excluded the school from NCLB's accountability system? Well, sorta:
Special education centers may be exempted from annual progress calculations, provided their students are counted somewhere else, ideally at each child's neighborhood school. Most of Maryland's 24 school systems make such exemptions.
But Montgomery school officials say it would be disingenuous to pretend that Stephen Knolls students attended any other school. Many of them have never studied anywhere else. Montgomery officials say the school deserves credit for working hard against long odds to make academic progress.
And why require these students to be "counted" somewhere else? Well, of course, if regulators didn't write that stipulation into the rule book, who knows how many school systems would have forced low-performing students into special education centers in order to hide their failures? After all, schools can't be trusted, don't you know?
Perhaps the next version of NCLB can start with a different premise. Let's expect state and local officials to do the right thing and make reasonable decisions, but allow room for enforcement when the few bad apples step out of line. Who knows--maybe people who live and work outside of Washington care about disadvantaged children just as much as we do.
