ISEN-ASTC-L is a service of the Association of Science-Technology Centers
Incorporated, a worldwide network of science museums and related institutions.
*****************************************************************************


States Help Schools Hide Minority Scores 


States are helping public schools escape potential penalties by skirting the
No Child Left Behind law's requirement that students of all races must show
annual academic progress. 


With the federal government's permission, schools aren't counting the test
scores of nearly 2 million students when they report progress by racial
groups, an Associated Press computer analysis found. Minorities - who
historically haven't fared as well as whites in testing - make up the vast
majority of students whose scores are being excluded, AP found. And the
numbers have been rising.

"I can't believe that my child is going through testing just like the person
sitting next to him or her and she's not being counted," said Angela Smith,
a single mother. Her daughter, Shunta' Winston, was among two dozen black
students whose test scores weren't broken out by race at her suburban Kansas
City, Mo., high school.

Under the law championed by
<http://search.news.yahoo.com/search/news/?p=President+Bush> President Bush,
all public school students must be proficient in reading and math by 2014,
although only children above second grade are required to be tested.

Schools receiving federal aid also must demonstrate annually that students
in all racial categories are progressing or risk penalties that include
extending the school year, changing curriculum or firing administrators and
teachers.

The U.S. Education Department said it didn't know the breadth of schools'
deliberate undercounting until seeing AP's findings.

"Is it too many? You bet," Education Secretary
<http://search.news.yahoo.com/search/news/?p=Margaret+Spellings> Margaret
Spellings said in an interview. "Are there things we need to do to look at
that, batten down the hatches, make sure those kids are part of the system?
You bet."

Students whose tests aren't being counted in required categories include
Hispanics in California who don't speak English well, blacks in the Chicago
suburbs, American Indians in the Northwest and special education students in
Virginia, AP found.

Bush's home state of Texas - once cited as a model for the federal law -
excludes scores for two entire groups. No test scores from Texas' 65,000
Asian students or from several thousand American Indian students are broken
out by race. The same is true in Arkansas.

One consequence is that educators are creating a false picture of academic
progress.

"The states aren't hiding the fact that they're gaming the system," said
Dianne Piche, executive director of the Citizens' Commission on Civil
Rights, a group that supports No Child Left Behind. "When you do the math
... you see that far from this law being too burdensome and too onerous,
there are all sorts of loopholes."

The law signed by Bush in 2002 requires public schools to test more than 25
million students periodically in reading and math. No scores can be excluded
from the overall measure.

But the schools also must report scores by categories, such as race,
poverty, migrant status, English proficiency and special education. Failure
in any category means the whole school fails.

States are helping schools get around that second requirement by using a
loophole in the law that allows them to ignore scores of racial groups that
are too small to be statistically significant.

Suppose, for example, that a school has 2,000 white students and nine
Hispanics. In nearly every state, the Hispanic scores wouldn't be reported
because there aren't enough to provide meaningful information.

State educators decide when a group is too small to count. And they've been
asking the government for exemptions to exclude larger numbers of students
in racial categories. Nearly two dozen states have successfully petitioned
the government for such exemptions in the past two years. As a result,
schools can now ignore racial breakdowns even when they have 30, 40 or even
50 students of a given race in the testing population. Students must be
tested annually in grades 3 through 8 and at least once in high school,
usually in 10th grade. This is the first school year that students in all
those grades must be tested, though schools have been reporting scores by
race for the tests they have been administering since the law was approved. 

To calculate a nationwide estimate, AP analyzed the 2003-04 enrollment
figures the government collected - the latest on record - and applied the
current racial category exemptions the states use. 

Overall, AP found that about 1.9 million students - or about 1 in every 14
test scores - aren't being counted under the law's racial categories.
Minorities are seven times as likely to have their scores excluded as
whites, the analysis showed. 

Less than 2 percent of white children's scores aren't being counted as a
separate category. In contrast, Hispanics and blacks have roughly 10 percent
of their scores excluded. More than one-third of Asian scores and nearly
half of American Indian scores aren't broken out, AP found. 

Ms. Smith's family in Missouri demonstrates how the exemptions work. Shunta'
and other black children in tested grades at Oak Park High School, which is
in a mostly white suburban Kansas City neighborhood, weren't counted as a
group because Missouri schools have federal permission not to break out
scores for any ethnic group with fewer than 30 students in the required
testing population. 

"Why don't they feel like she's important enough to rearrange things to make
it count?" her mother asked. 

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." 

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." 

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." 

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. 

 


***********************************************************************
More information about the Informal Science Education Network and the
Association of Science-Technology Centers may be found at http://www.astc.org.
To remove your e-mail address from the ISEN-ASTC-L list, send the
message  SIGNOFF ISEN-ASTC-L in the BODY of a message to
[log in to unmask]