Kansas Reporter
August 10, 2011
Headline: Kansas Board of Ed considers shedding No Child Left Behind

By Gene Meyer

TOPEKA - Fewer Kansas schools flunked the federal achievement standards for math and reading set by the federal No Child Left Behind Act, but Kansas state school board members say they want out of the program anyway.

"Now we need to show how we intend to measure progress with the whole student in mind," said Kansas State Board of Education Chairman Dave Dennis, of Wichita.

Parents frustrated by No Child Left Behind's raise-scores-or-suffer approach will welcome such a change, said Karen Wagner, of Overland Park.

People move to the upscale section of Kansas City, so their children attend Shawnee Mission USD 512 schools. Wagner's children have received their education in this district. Yet, this year, this district and specifically the middle school her youngest son attends came up short of the federal standards, Wagner said.

Wagner said she believes the federal standards don't adequately measure what schools do.

"They measure how one group of seventh-graders did on their tests compared to seventh-graders a year earlier, but they don't measure how much those seventh-graders improve during the year," she said. "That's the growth model that should be our top priority."

And that is the direction state School Board members say they want to go if, as they expect, they seek a waiver from No Child Left Behind standards next month.

During the 2011 school year, 213 of Kansas' 1,367 public schools and 77 of its 289 school districts failed to meet annually rising federal standards for increasing the number of students achieving reading and math proficiency, Tom Foster, the state Education Department's research and evaluation director told board members at their August meeting this week.

If a school fails to meet the federal standards, parents can transfer their children to other schools or districts, which ultimately could reduce the amount of federal and state aid those schools receive.

The latest list of schools that failed to meet federal targets includes many of the state's highest profile districts, including Shawnee Mission in Johnson County, and the Topeka, Wichita and Kansas City public schools.

However, that's an improvement from the previous year, when 254 schools and 82 districts fell short of federal standards, Foster said.

Education Department staff members are studying the report to find the biggest contributors to the improvement, "but we think teachers are more focused on state standards and making better assessments of adjustments they need to make as they teach," he said.

But, in contrast to that improvement, the number that have failed to meet federal standards two or more consecutive years increased to 46 schools and 34 districts, or nine more schools and 10 more districts than a year earlier.

"It's not surprising that we're seeing more schools (fall short of the federal standards) from year to year given that performance targets are increasing as much as 8 percent each year," said Diane DeBacker, Kansas' education commissioner.

Earlier this year, the U.S. Education Department rejected Kansas' request to waive the latest federal requirements, which require all Kansas students to meet federal reading and math proficiency standards.

But earlier this week, U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan said his department would waive those higher standards if states asked, because Congress has failed to make changes in the George W. Bush administration's No Child Left Behind Act, sought by the Obama administration since last year.

Board members said they wanted to explore alternatives to the No Child Left Behind requirements.

One suggested option is Common Core, a creation of the National Governors Association, which is the bipartisan Washington policy arm of the states' 50 chief executives, and state school superintendents' associations in more than three dozen states.

Common Core sets performance standards that states agree to meet, but is designed to allow individual states more flexibility in setting their own curricula based on those standards.

However, Kansas' board members Tuesday expressed skepticism about Common Core.

"It's No Child Left Behind on steroids," said Board Member Walt Chappell, of Wichita, who worries that rigorous Common Core testing requirements would hurt, more than help, the education Kansas children receive.

"As a former local school board member, I have trouble with state mandates too," said Janet Waugh, of Kansas City, who favors a statewide policy giving individual schools more freedom to develop their own best practices adapt them from other districts.