With the reauthorization of No Child Left Behind stalled, the New York Times reminds us today why Congress should push forward on reforming the law: Every single one of the 6,063 public schools serving poor children in California is at risk of being “restructured” in 2014, the year when students across the country are supposed to be “universally” proficient in reading and math. Of course, during the five years of NCLB up to this point, no state has actually radically restructured or closed a school due to it failing to meet NCLB guidelines. Strict enforcement isn’t likely to appear anytime soon. But local schools will be punished with that nasty “failing” label, and risk losing access to federal funding and grants.
The House bipartisan draft proposal updating NCLB retains the expectation that all students be proficient by the 2013-2014 school year, but allows states to consider assessment scores other than those in English and math, such as history, science, and civics. But it remains frustrating that nobody is talking about an underlying problem: As long as poor, struggling, often non-English fluent kids are clustered together, their schools — who take on the toughest work in the field of education — will be set up for “failure.”
–Dana Goldstein