States Omit Minorities' School Scores--seems a shame people so want to be in on it.....

[Rich Gibson <rgibson@pipeline.com>]

> AP: States Omit Minorities' School Scores
>
>
>
> By FRANK BASS, NICOLE ZIEGLER DIZON and BEN FELLER, Associated Press 
> Writers 13 minutes ago
>
> 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 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 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.
>
> ___
>
> Associated Press Writers Laura Wides-Munoz in Miami, Nahal Toosi in New 
> York and Garance Burke in Kansas City contributed to this report.
>
> On the Net:
>
> U.S. Education Department: http://www.ed.gov/