Creep

No Child Left Behind took a big hit today. Secretary Spellings' formal approval($) today of six "differentiated accountability" state pilot plans solidifies what I wrote a month ago: these are little more than ways to avoid consequences.

The name of the pilot program, "differentiated accountability," bugs me. While suggestive of reasonableness and perspective, it really hits at the core of NCLB. It provides flexibility in acknowledging that schools with all their students failing are different that ones with only a portion. But isn't that the exact opposite of what we needed? Wasn't No Child primarily urging us to not be satisfied with overall averages but instead look at all types of students?

When we take data and parse out how African-American, Latino, special education, or other small categories of students are doing, we gain information that we didn't have before. NCLB required this disaggregation of data, it held schools accountable for making sure every single category of students reached proficiency, and it made achievement gaps prevalent in our national dialog more so than ever before.

The new flexibility backtracks from that. All six of the approved plans (for Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Maryland, and Ohio) feature some type of simple arithmetic formula based on the number of categories in which a school fails. So, for example, schools in Ohio with 31% of their sub-groups failing are treated differently than ones with 29%. These numbers are completely arbitrary. That they vary widely by state shows they were made randomly or with political considerations in mind.

Secretary Spellings, in approving the plans, said this:

As the person who sees and approves state accountability plans under NCLB, I can tell you there is strong pressure to weaken, water down, find loopholes, and delay real accountability. Some of these efforts often have fancy names like "multiple measures" or "authentic assessments." Others efforts are not so fancy, like when opponents spend millions to tarnish NCLB.

Millions weren't spent today to tarnish NCLB. The Secretary did it herself.

Update: David Hoff finds the comments made by expert peer reviews. It's chock full of quotes like this:

The methods appeared largely to be based on methods of convenience rather than a focus on the underlying causes of schools inability to meet AYP. [bold original]

and this:

Very few of the proposals included a backstop to ensure that schools in milder levels of intervention did not allow any single group to persistently under-perform.