Ellington

Sept. 3, 2003

The chickens George W. Bush hatched in January 2001 when he signed the No Child Left Behind education bill are starting to come home to roost. Now in the second year of high-stakes federal testing requirements that treat every student just alike—regardless of background, special-ed status or need for remediation—public schools are beginning to feel the pressure of federally required but under-funded tests. The NCLB standards may cause them to shut their doors if they can't figure out how to bring every student up to "proficient" (next to highest out of four levels) with the sole determination being the outcomes of controversial tests.

In Mississippi this month, 10 public schools learned that they have been placed on the "failing" list, two of them here in the Jackson Public Schools district: Brinkley Middle School and Morrison Academic Advancement Center.

Morrison is a special school where up to 200 young men and women go when they fail the sixth grade—for remediation. The point is to help bring them back up to speed with extra attention and tutoring. This year's class, all reportedly African-American, is a different group from last year and had nothing to do with the last round of scores—the ones that just flagged the school as "failing." Yet, they are now attending a school stigmatized because the last class, while some students showed growth, did not measure up to the "adequate yearly progress" required by Bush's NCLB. The education act allows no discretion for young people who have already been deemed in need of extra help. They are treated exactly like everyone else, and branded as "failing" when they—or their predecessors—don't measure up. Meantime, school districts are scrambling to find the money to pay for needed remediation in order to prevent drop-outs of "failing" kids, even as the federal government has reneged on millions of dollars it pledged to help the public schools meet the NCLB challenges.