By Kevin Hardy

The Kansas State Board of Education is asking the U.S. Department of Education to waive the state's testing benchmarks under the No Child Left Behind Act.

State Board Chairman David Dennis sent a letter this week to U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan asking that testing targets remain at the 2009-10 level. The No Child Left Behind legislation requires performance on state assessments to increase each year until all students reach proficiency or above in the 2013-14 school year.

Several other states have made similar waiver requests to the U.S. Department of Education, though none has been approved.

Congress will likely soon reauthorize - and in the process change - the federal benchmark law. In the meantime, the U.S. department has authored the "Blueprint for Reform," which identifies alternative methods of attaining school improvement.

"Seeking this flexibility for Kansas schools is something our state board feels strongly about," Dennis said in a prepared statement. "Because the federal legislation that provides the guidelines by which schools are held accountable for student performance is due to be reauthorized, this is an ideal time to request this modification to our state accountability plan."

The "Blueprint for Reform" contains measures of student achievement and education reform different than the state testing benchmarks in the No Child Left Behind law.

Dennis says Kansas has already undertaken some of these new reforms, making NCLB an already outdated mandate. Dennis pointed to the state's recent adoption of the Common Core Standards for mathematics and English/language arts, which will provide a broader, more national set of learning standards. The state has also developed a longitudinal database system that allows the tracking of individual students over time.

Dennis said Kansas' membership as a governing state in the SMARTER Balanced Assessment Consortium also attests to the state's educational reforms already in progress. The consortium consists of 30 states working toward building a common set of assessments; Kansas will implement the new, international tests by the 2014-15 year.

"In light of these initiatives, which clearly demonstrate Kansas' continued commitment to education reforms, I am asking that our state be granted flexibility in our accountability plan," Dennis said in his letter to Washington.

The likelihood of Kansas - or any other state - reaching 100 percent proficiency on state assessments has been widely questioned by politicians, educators and experts since the law was signed into law by President George W. Bush in 2001.

Kansas State Department of Education spokeswoman Kathy Toelkes said Kansas schools will struggle to meet benchmarks as the clock ticks down to 2013-14. Schools that don't make adequate yearly progress, or AYP, on their state assessments face sanctions as laid out in the NCLB law.

"We're getting up near that 100 percent. That's going to become increasingly difficult," she said. "I think there's a fairly wide consensus that the 100 percent is really unrealistic."

She said the board's request for a waiver doesn't mean it's trying to get away from increasing student achievement.

"We're not saying we don't want to be held accountable," she said. "But we would like to hold these accountability measures steady while we implement these new standards."