The Daily Republic (Pierre, SD)
June 13, 2011
Headline: MERCER: School boards, facing failure, decide to quit early on NCLB

By Bob Mercer

PIERRE - White flags can carry different meanings.

In auto racing a white flag signals the start of the last lap, time for a driver to turn it loose for one final push. In combat a white flag signals surrender, or at least a temporary truce.

The elected leaders of our public school systems raised the white flag a few days ago regarding No Child Left Behind.

It was a flag of surrender, rather than a final push.

Specifically, nearly every public school district in South Dakota appears likely to fail the federal requirement that every student be proficient in reading and math in the 2013-2014 school year.

The white flag came from the board of directors for the Associated School Boards of South Dakota through a resolution.

The resolution calls upon federal Education Secretary Arne Duncan to suspend sanctions that South Dakota schools face for failing to make adequate yearly progress on NCLB.

The school boards association issued a news release Wednesday announcing passage of the resolution.

The release, through soonto-be retired executive director Wayne Lueders, said that cuts in state education funding would increase the difficulty of reaching the goal that no child be left behind when it comes to math and reading.

About 15 percent of South Dakota's public schools are on the NCLB "needs improvement" list now. Making that list means a school faces additional federal requirements intended to upgrade the students' performance.

Education Secretary Melody Schopp reportedly informed the school board association's leadership last month that some 85 percent of South Dakota's schools probably will wind up on the needs-improvement list, unless Congress changes the requirements soon.

It's amazing, when you think about it.

Congress, through a compromise reached 10 years ago between the late Democratic U.S. Sen. Ted Kennedy and Republican then-President George W. Bush, set targets that education leaders in South Dakota and other states decided they can't reach.

Currently three of four students in South Dakota schools are proficient or better in math and reading. That one of every four kids in a class isn't proficient seems like the strongest reason against raising the white flag of surrender.

Wouldn't it be truer to the spirit of South Dakotans to use the final two years to see how close we can come? Wouldn't it be better to be waving the white flag of the final lap?

Students probably pay little or zero attention to resolutions and news releases from the Associated School Boards of South Dakota. That's good.

Because those elected school board members who comprise the ASBSD's board of directors are saying it's OK to quit when you think the requirements are too hard.

Is 100 percent proficiency possible? Congress thought so. And what other option could there be? A law that says it's fine to leave 10 percent of the children behind?

Then someone would have wanted 20 percent. Maybe 25 percent, as is the case for South Dakota?

NCLB has been a tremendous success for the nation. We now know how strong, or not, our schools are. The same is true for each teacher and for each student. We have seen administrators, teachers and staff work to improve students' performance.

NCLB forced scrutiny across the board. Suddenly academic performance was treated much as we've done for a century at schools' athletic events.

In sports, we keep score, we log statistics about individual performances, we record wins and losses, and we award trophies. NCLB did much of the same, student by student, class by class, school by school, and district by district.

There have been widespread complaints for a decade about the impossibility of NCLB's basic premise that no child be left behind. There also have been widespread complaints about insufficient funding to pay for more staff and materials that might have helped reach that goal.

Maybe age clouds memory, but nothing comes to mind regarding Associated School Boards of South Dakota making a specific, targeted request for more funding from the Legislature in order to better accomplish NCLB.

Perhaps some school boards went to their local taxpayers with specific plans, but nothing comes to mind either regarding optout requests related to NCLB.

Instead the Associated School Boards of South Dakota organizations wants local boards to adopt similar resolutions calling for the NCLB sanctions to be lifted before they can take effect on a widespread basis.

Which is better: To keep trying until the very end and see how close we can come; or to quit two years early, admitting you've already failed?

A white flag is a white flag, except when it's a white flag.