Others ask: “So what?”
For the past month, Missoula County Public Schools Superintendent Jim Clark has warned that the city's 2006 No Child Left Behind test scores will trigger “corrective action” under the federal rules. A second bad year, which Clark also predicts, would put MCPS in the “restructuring” category.
But when measured at the district level, enough of Missoula's special education students failed to make AYP to trigger federal sanctions. NCLB rules divide students into subgroups by race, income status, special education and limited-English comprehension. If a school has less than 40 students in a given subgroup, their scores will be mixed in with the whole population.
But the MCPS district as a whole is evaluated by the same rule. And taken all together, there are at least 40 children with American Indian heritage, enrolled in special education programs or living in low-income families. Those three groups in particular have tended to score below AYP at the district level for the past four years.
Special education children have been a conundrum for Missoula schools and NCLB tests. On one hand, the district has made extra efforts to strengthen its special education programs in the face of community demands.
“We've got more of those children because of the medical facilities here,” MCPS Trustee Nancy Pickhardt told her colleagues during a recent discussion of the test scores. Trustee Toni Rehbein questioned how the school district was ever to get ahead of the challenge.
“I'm wondering how realistic it is to measure kids and expect growth in kids who have serious disabilities,” Rehbein asked. “But that's what the federal government is asking of us.”
And that's where the second irony comes in. What the federal government demands and what it can enforce are separate things in Montana.
So if MCPS ends up in corrective action status this year, Clark said it may have to change the way it spends federal Title I money. That's the roughly 9 percent of its budget that goes to the district's most struggling learners.
But unlike other states with top-down education management, Montana's Office of Public Instruction has no power to restructure schools. Administrators and teachers are hired and paid by local school boards. And while the state sets curriculum standards and licensing requirements, it lacks power to interfere in those local activities.
“Our structure is very decentralized,” OPI spokesman Joe Lamson said. “Our superintendent neither has nor wants that authority to restructure schools or take people's licenses.”
OPI can order a school district to rewrite its five-year education plan, which lists how it will help the children who have the most trouble making AYP. But it depends on the good will of local districts to actually make the changes.
“The ultimate tightening of thumbscrews is when the federal government decides to have a showdown with Montana over 145,000 kids,” Lamson said. “They'll say, ‘If Montana doesn't do X, Y, and Z, we'll cut off all your federal funding.' Montana will say yes or no. But the Legislature isn't going to pass a constitutional amendment to take away local control of schools. So it's our position that the state Constitution trumps the NCLB law. If we go to the Supreme Court, we believe we'll prevail.”
There are currently 37 schools in Montana on the restructuring list. Lamson said OPI has created teams of teaching experts who are sent to help fashion improvements at those schools.
What will almost certainly happen next week in Missoula, and has already happened in Great Falls, is a flood of letters to school families informing them of the district's failure to make AYP. The letters will also advise them of the option to transfer to another school in the district if they feel it will improve their children's education.
OPI has proposed measuring children on their individual progress rather than their ability to pass a standardized math and reading test. So far, the U.S. Department of Education has refused to accept the Montana proposal.
“Kids in special ed are there, by definition, because they have special-ed needs,” Lamson said. “They have individual plans for how they should improve. We think that's what they should be judged on - not against all the other students who don't have those needs.”
MCPS Special Education Director Candy Lubansky echoed that concept.
“All kids are expected to make progress, but that needs to be measured accurately,” Lubansky said. “Helping a child with severe cognitive delays to manage the job application process is five times more difficult than a normal kid learning biology. There should be a respect for and a way to quantify that challenged situation.”
Nationally, efforts to change No Child Left Behind standards are getting a mixed reception. The 5 1/2-year-old law is up for reauthorization this year. A draft bill being reviewed in Congress allows more individual growth models such as those Montana is requesting. It also proposes using graduation rates and college application levels as alternative measuring sticks for school district performance.
The Education Trust research organization savaged a 435-page draft revision to the federal law last week.
“The efforts to dumb-down the definitions of progress and success by well-financed and ill-informed defenders of the status quo are gaining traction,” Education Trust vice president Amy Wilkins said of the draft reauthorization. She argued that allowing more local assessments instead of state tests would “turn back the clock to a time when the quality of students' education depended more on their ZIP code than on their potential.”
In the other direction, Education Next editor Paul Peterson of Harvard University said the new law should concentrate on measuring both individual student and teacher progress through state databases. Rather than simply meeting the AYP threshold, schools would face an A-to-F grade like their students do, he said.
That would dovetail with Montana schools' efforts, Lamson said.
“We have the database program there, but you also need several years' worth of data to make your point,” Lamson said. “That's the stage we're at now. We're working through our own congressional delegation to change the act. I expect we will have recommendations out by end of September.”
The federal bill is expected to go before the House Education Committee Sept. 10. It could reach a full House vote by early October.
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