No Child Left Unbeaten

Wash Post education writer Jay Mathews has an interesting column on the effects of the No Child Left Behind Act, which was supposed to fix bad public schools by giving students the right to leave chronically crappy and dangerous institutions. He points to this hilarious graphic identifying all 26 schools nationwide that have earned the designation "persistently dangerous"–two in South Dakota and the rest in Pennsylvania and New Jersey.

Writes Mathews,

Where are New York and Illinois and Ohio and Michigan and California and a lot of other places with similarly afflicted neighborhoods? And if all their schools are as safe as Sesame Street, what in the name of all the statistical deities is SOUTH DAKOTA doing on this map, with two persistently dangerous educational institutions?

A supporter of No Child, Mathews nonetheless writes about how schools have co-opted the new standards so that they redefine themselves out of any problem areas without actually having to change the way they do anything (surprise, surprise, surprise).

The allegedly harsh punishments in the law, such as closing low-performing schools in favor of charters or having the state take them over, have mostly been ignored in favor of lesser penalties that are similar to what districts have been doing with troubled schools for many years.

In Michigan, for instance, despite having 162 schools that are supposed to be restructured because of little or no test score improvement, "no schools were closed and reopened as charters," [Education Week] reported, "and the state decided not to take over any schools because it lacked the capacity to do so."

And oh yeah, not only are schools magically getting safer and better-performing, teachers are becoming "highly qualified" overnight, too.

Whole thing here.

In a recent issue of Reason, Lisa Snell looked at the No Child Left Behind Act and found it to be a bitter exercise in phony rhetoric about "choice." That disturbing story is here.