Mis Spellings

Soviet-style laws will garner Soviet-style results.

Jose is a second language learner, as is Maria, Julio and Jaime. Jose is a 455, Maria a 580, Julio a 327, and Jaime a 456. This is a little sample mathematics story problem. I know how we all dreaded those story problems, but this one is quite simple. If you have Maria, Julio, Jaime and Maria in class and you have to show improvement in reading scores for Colorado and for the No Child Left Behind improvement quota, and the passing score is 457, which students would you focus on? [Answer: Jose and Jaime.]

The saddest part of that little sample problem is that it is real. Teachers are being told, yes told, to focus on those students who are most likely to move from the Partially Proficient to the Proficient categories. These aren't evil people. The system establishes every rational reason to leave Maria and Julio behind in order to "show" progress.

In the old Soviet Union, if a factory was given a quota for 5,000 pounds of nuts, it didn't really matter whether those nuts had holes, or fit the bolts, or were round or square. In fact, it was easier and faster to produce holeless nuts, since they weigh more and meet the quota faster. With 6,000 pounds of holeless nuts, you might even receive a commendation. Jose and Jaime are our little holeless nuts under the "No Child Left Behind" quota system of improvement. The high stakes and severe sanctions for not meeting NCLB or state-level education quotas demand that kind of rationality. And the quotas are not "good goals", they are utopian wizardry. Yet the "improvement" propaganda of NCLB drones on and on.

Do you think that FEMA would dare to publically set a goal of 100% of disaster victims surviving? Yet the NCLB sets a goal of 100% of students acheiving at grade level by 2014. And the only way to try to achieve that, even in the short run, is to eject those students from the system that can't achieve at that level.

The Department of Education also wants to limit the percentage of students taking alternate assessments whose scores would not be counted in adequate yearly progress (AYP) calculations. That limit would be 1.0 percent of the state's (or district's) total number of students in the grades assessed.

If a district has more than 1.0% of special education or non-English speaking students? Well, another Soviet quota. Maria and Julio have become liabilities.

Most teachers knew this. Almost all teachers recoil at the systemic abandonment of so many students. Teachers will, however, be under increasing pressure to cut the losses, meet the quota, and manufacture holeless nuts. But sometimes, you have to throw open the shutters and yell that you just won't take it any more.

The Department of Education website states, "Spellings announces more workable, common sense approach to NCLB." Read that again. It couldn't be clearer. NCLB is unworkable and not at all common sense. It's time to cut the Soviet-style quota system of NCLB out of education and get back to the real task of leaving no child behind, before NCLB cuts the "public" out of education.