BCT Editorial – 4/25/06

This page was last updated on April 26, 2006.

Set up to fail; Editorial; Beaver County Times; April 25, 2006.

Below is a detailed critique of the subject editorial.

“Let the games begin.

“The Riverside School District has found a way to get around the federal No Child Left Behind Act by taking advantage of the state’s requirement that 40 students or more are needed before a subgroup can have its average yearly progress reported under NCLB.

“While the district’s overall enrollment and economically distressed student subset were making AYP, its special-needs children were not. Making AYP is important because schools that don’t can be penalized under NCLB, even if it is only one subset of students.

“The district’s solution was to rcreating [sic] a fourth ‘school’ so that each school’s special-needs enrollment would fall below 40 and thereby be exempted from AYP mandates.

“Quite frankly, if we were Riverside administrators, we’d do the same thing. NCLB was set up so that school districts would fail. Why shouldn’t they do what they can to avoid that trap?”

[RWC] Before I begin, I oppose all federal government involvement in education.

Here are my observations about this editorial.

First, the author asserts, “NCLB was set up so that school districts would fail” yet the editorial provides no supporting evidence.

Second, the editorial encourages a school district to abuse the rules because the author doesn’t like the rules. Other than just being wrong, that’s a nice example to set for kids. If Riverside doesn’t like the rules, it has a proper alternative; don’t accept federal tax dollars. As I’ve noted time after time, school districts that don’t accept federal tax dollars don’t need to adhere to the rules of the NCLBA.