States Help Schools Hide
Minority Scores
AP Photo WX301
By FRANK BASS, NICOLE ZIEGLER DIZON and BEN FELLER
Associated Press Writers
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
Bush's home state of
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
``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
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
``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:
With one of the most
diverse school populations in the nation,
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
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
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