Federal school mandate structure questioned

BY PATRICIA A. MILLER

Staff Writer

KEYPORT — While the goals of the federal No Child Left Behind Act are laudable, the scoring structure is not, school officials said at the Board of Education meeting last week.

"There are problems with this, and hopefully it can be rectified," said Schools Superintendent John S. Dumford.

"We all agree that we want everybody to succeed," said Gail Wovna, the district’s curriculum director.

The act requires all students to be proficient in both language arts literacy and mathematics by the 2013-14 school year.

Keyport’s Central School failed to meet only one indicator out of 40 benchmarks set by the state to ensure schools meet the Adequate Yearly Progress provisions of the federal law, Wovna said.

"We made 39 indicators in grade 8," Wovna said.

School officials have contacted the state Department of Education about test results for Keyport High School. The numbers were skewed, Wovna said, because nine special education students came into the district after July 1.

The test results for those students should have been included in the districts they came from, not Keyport’s, Wovna said.

"We’re not supposed to have them counted," she said. "Ours were. I don’t want them on my list."

Seventy-five percent of the high schools in the state, 271 out of 361, did not meet all of the 40 indicators, according to the DOE.

The problem with the act is that it breaks students down into subgroups. If any one of the subgroups does not make adequate yearly progress, the entire school is considered not to have made adequate progress, she said.

"I don’t mind the test," she said after the meeting. "But it’s crazy to break kids up into different subgroups like that. When we put all of the mixes together in our general education group, we passed. But when you break out the subgroups, that’s where the districts are having problems with their indicators. They’ve never had to cope with this before."

The focus of the act should be on helping each child reach their potential, Wovna said.

"Some children in special ed, they will never meet the proficiency because they just don’t have the ability to do that," she said. "It’s unrealistic that by 2014 every single child in the United States is going to be at the same level. Some are going to be beyond, but some won’t. They can’t."

The act does not apply to charter schools or private schools, Wovna said.

"I just thought I’d throw that little tidbit in," she said.

If a school in a district does not show improvement, parents can opt to have their child transferred to another district school that has met all the benchmarks, Wovna said. But that won’t affect Keyport, she added.

"We don’t have to worry about that," she said. "There are only two schools."

The law applies to all school districts that participate in Title I, a voluntary federal program that provides funds to participating states to help educate low-income students.

"We have to abide by this law or we won’t get our Title I money," Wovna said. "We have enough kids on free or reduced lunch to qualify for Title I funds."