LttE - Our cheating schools

Submitted to the OC Register on 6/14/2005:

Erica Perez’s article was very enlightening. Every parent of every student in that district should be questioning the ethics of the administrators in charge of the teachers who are teaching their kids.

This article, along with one by the Reason Public Policy Institute’s Lisa Snell, really spotlights the negative effects of the No Child Left Behind Act. Instead of improvement in education, what we’re seeing is less education and numbers-fudging in order to meet arbitrary goals. I’ll bet very few people reading this know that all it takes for a California school to report “adequate yearly progress” in reading is for 13% of its students to score at the 51st percentile on a standardized test.

13% may be good enough for the administrators who are only concerned with keeping the federal funding gravy train rolling in, but it shouldn’t be good enough for parents who want educated children.