Uproar over supposed NCLB "loophole"
The AP has published a story breathlessly alleging that "States Omit Minorities' School Scores".
Good grief has this story taken off! As I write this, Google News finds more than 500 publications that are running this story. Predictably, bloggers are posting prolifically on the instant controversy.
Only one problem. The story gets it entirely wrong. They simply do not know what they are talking about. Ditto for the bloggers. So let me step into this fray.
The "loophole" they raise the alarm over is actually a very necessary limit on a dangerous and perverse part of NCLB. The kids who are supposedly not counted are, in fact, counted appropriately. All student's scores count towards their school's test score. So no students are left uncounted.
Good grief has this story taken off! As I write this, Google News finds more than 500 publications that are running this story. Predictably, bloggers are posting prolifically on the instant controversy.
Only one problem. The story gets it entirely wrong. They simply do not know what they are talking about. Ditto for the bloggers. So let me step into this fray.
The "loophole" they raise the alarm over is actually a very necessary limit on a dangerous and perverse part of NCLB. The kids who are supposedly not counted are, in fact, counted appropriately. All student's scores count towards their school's test score. So no students are left uncounted.
What is happening is this: under NCLB, if any identified ethnic subgroup fails progress, the school is considered to be failing to progress. That fits with the goal of leaving no child behind, right? When there are too few students of a particular ethnic group to form a statistically relevant cohort, NCLB does not track that ethnic group's progress. Since NCLB marks the intrusion of the feds into territory that has traditionally been a state and local concern, NCLB leaves a fair amount of leeway for states to set their own rules about what is significant and what is not. Thank God for that, many of us would agree.
The problem is that this all-groups-must-progress rule has the unintended effect of penalizing diverse schools. Consider two schools with the same number of students. One is segregated, with one or maybe two identified ethnic groups in the school. The other is diverse, with maybe four or five ethnic cohorts. The diverse school will always be at greater risk of penalty under the rule since their groups will be smaller and more statistically volatile. This is simple statistics and remains equally true no matter which ethnicities are under the microscope.
Back to the loophole. NCLB recognizes that tracking exceedingly small cohorts would lead to penalizing schools for meaningless statistical noise—variations that have no bearing on the school's performance or the progress of the students. If you try and track the progress of say, 4 American Indian kids in a school of 800 students, of course there will be far greater volatility for the AI kids' scores. It makes no sense to track their performance as an ethnic group. So they don't require it.
In fact, dividing some diverse schools into small cohorts while not dividing more segregated schools makes no sense either. It is truly perverse and wrong-headed. But at least the "loophole" mitigates this regulatory disaster. Far from being a cause for outrage, this regulatory sanity should be viewed as evidence of the insanity of the underlying NCLB regulations.
The other manufactured outrage in the article is the allegation that this loophole is being used to exclude minority kids. This allegation merely confirms the complete lack of comprehension by the reporters. Of course minorities will tend to be "under-counted" in this scheme. Minorities, especially those that escape segregated neighborhoods, will tend to be dispersed in statistically insignificant numbers—because they are in the minority! Duh! Majority kids, white kids, or Asian kids here in SF, will be far less likely to be in such small numbers as to be statistically insignificant. Again, duh! What is so hard to understand about this? There is no sinister plot to hide the lack of progress of minority kids here. This is merely statistics in action. Clearly, this simple numeracy is too much to ask of journalists.
There are many, many reasons to question NCLB. There are many, many reasons to question the motives of some educators, who will tend to be racist in the same proportion as the general population. But this story gets it all wrong.
The problem is that this all-groups-must-progress rule has the unintended effect of penalizing diverse schools. Consider two schools with the same number of students. One is segregated, with one or maybe two identified ethnic groups in the school. The other is diverse, with maybe four or five ethnic cohorts. The diverse school will always be at greater risk of penalty under the rule since their groups will be smaller and more statistically volatile. This is simple statistics and remains equally true no matter which ethnicities are under the microscope.
Back to the loophole. NCLB recognizes that tracking exceedingly small cohorts would lead to penalizing schools for meaningless statistical noise—variations that have no bearing on the school's performance or the progress of the students. If you try and track the progress of say, 4 American Indian kids in a school of 800 students, of course there will be far greater volatility for the AI kids' scores. It makes no sense to track their performance as an ethnic group. So they don't require it.
In fact, dividing some diverse schools into small cohorts while not dividing more segregated schools makes no sense either. It is truly perverse and wrong-headed. But at least the "loophole" mitigates this regulatory disaster. Far from being a cause for outrage, this regulatory sanity should be viewed as evidence of the insanity of the underlying NCLB regulations.
The other manufactured outrage in the article is the allegation that this loophole is being used to exclude minority kids. This allegation merely confirms the complete lack of comprehension by the reporters. Of course minorities will tend to be "under-counted" in this scheme. Minorities, especially those that escape segregated neighborhoods, will tend to be dispersed in statistically insignificant numbers—because they are in the minority! Duh! Majority kids, white kids, or Asian kids here in SF, will be far less likely to be in such small numbers as to be statistically insignificant. Again, duh! What is so hard to understand about this? There is no sinister plot to hide the lack of progress of minority kids here. This is merely statistics in action. Clearly, this simple numeracy is too much to ask of journalists.
There are many, many reasons to question NCLB. There are many, many reasons to question the motives of some educators, who will tend to be racist in the same proportion as the general population. But this story gets it all wrong.
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