By Joshua Brown

HARRISONBURG - Local school division leaders welcome the recent announcement that federal officials will look at overhauling the No Child Left Behind Act.

Education Secretary Arne Duncan said last week that President Barack Obama would look to revamp No Child Left Behind this year, but offered no details of the overhaul. Some key Republicans also have expressed a willingness to reconfigure parts of the federal legislation.

Signed into law in 2002 by President George W. Bush, the bill established federal yearly benchmarks, called Adequate Yearly Progress, for student performance on standardized testing in grades three through eight.

While states can use their own standardized tests to meet AYP goals, failing to meet the benchmarks repeatedly can result in various sanctions against the schools.

By 2014, divisions must increase their passing rates to 100 percent under the federal legislation.

County Schools

Rockingham County Schools Assistant Superintendent Ed Smith said that while the act increases expectations for student performance, it doesn't give enough credit to schools that improve their students' performance year-over-year.

"If you can look at growth and measure that, that's a plus," said Smith, who argues that it is all but impossible to reach a 100 percent passing rate.

Not all students learn at the same pace, making funding programs to help slower learners a concern in meeting the federal benchmarks, Smith said. Some schools, he said, keep students long after the final bell of the day to help them catch up to their peers.

"We try to provide some more after-school [programs], but funding is an issue," Smith said. "For some students it just takes more time, and we try to provide that."

Harrisonburg City Schools Superintendent Scott Kizner has similar concerns, saying one student may begin a year already able to pass a standardized test, while another might start the year nowhere near able to pass, but still make substantial headway.

"So, I think you have to look at a growth model instead of just a pass-fail model," he said.

Kizner agrees with Smith that the law does well in its endeavor to establish "high expectations" of students, but the mandate of achieving a 100 percent pass rate is unreasonable.

Kizner said he also would like to see more leniency for schools and divisions that have diverse student populations like Harrisonburg, where 37 percent of students were not born in the United States.

Local Legislator

Rep. Bob Goodlatte, R-Roanoke, said Monday that while he doesn't know what Obama plans specifically, he would like to see the law overhauled so that states could opt out of the accountability standards of NCLB as long as their standards were high enough.

Goodlatte commended the premise behind the law - giving states more educational latitude while still providing some federal funding and oversight - but said it has become too bureaucratic.

"The whole thing got bogged down in massive amounts of red tape," he said. "The best way for the federal government to help ... would be easing up a lot of the red tape that snares superintendents across the country."