No White Child Left Behind

An Associated Press study has revealed a bit (well, a lot) of skullduggery in the reporting of No Child Left Behind test scores. Under NCLB guidelines, schools with small numbers of a certain ethnicity—white kids in Camden, NJ, but black, Asian, and Hispanic kids everywhere else—aren't required to report those kids' test scores. Here's your ironic pull quote:

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.

The problem has probably gone unnoticed in no small part because the president only visits schools with large numbers of adorable black children.

Lisa Snell's comprehensive critique of NCLB appeared in the October 2004 issue of Reason.