The Daily Howler Howls at Me

Charles Pyle, spokesman for the Virginia Department of Education, explained that in 2000, the state school board changed the counting procedure to encourage more schools to do what Maury did -- give the students who failed some extra help and let them try again. Often the second-test passing rates of students who flunk a test initially are lower than their class's overall passing rate, since they are the class's weakest students. So if those second-test results were combined with the first test results in the usual way, it would likely lower the overall percentage and make the school look worse than otherwise. School districts in Virginia figured this out and resisted the urge to work with their lowest-performing students and test them again.

To give schools an incentive to make that effort, the school board ordered an unorthodox change in the way the school percentage would be calculated after the retesting. If a school had 100 students, with 30 failing the test the first time and 10 of those passing the test the second time, they could add 10 to the 70 who passed the first time, divide those 80 passing students by 100, and get a nice boost from 70 to 80 percent in their passing rate. Done the conventional way, they would have had to add 30 to the denominator as they added 10 to the numerator, and gotten a passing rate of only 62 percent, lower than the 70 percent rate they had before.

Wasn't that fun? This is another good example why I am glad I paid attention in fifth-grade arithmetic.

This explanation did not make Somerby happy, however. To him, it dramatized the idiotic complexity of the assessment process, and I agree with him. As I have said many times in this column, much of the No Child Left Behind law makes no sense in the real world. The notion that almost all students will reach proficiency in math and reading by 2014 is a fantasy, unless we push our definition of proficiency down so low that it becomes meaningless. Important members of Congress from both parties put that in there because they did not want to be accused of condemning some children to non-proficiency, and in an era where politicians are labeled anti-war for simply questioning the decision-making that led to war, I understand their concerns.

So No Child Left Behind is a mess, as Somerby says, but what is the alternative? Somerby is a smart guy. If he were given dictatorial power to set up a national school assessment process, I imagine his plan would make great sense and not require all this bizarre fiddling with passing rates.

Unfortunately, in the real world, under the Constitution, he would have to share the power to create his plan with the states, the courts and, most importantly, the Congress, the architect of the least sane parts of No Child Left Behind.

So should we just scrap school assessments based on testing altogether? I would say no. Despite all the confusion and frustration, Education Week's Quality Counts reports show that students are learning more than they were 10 years ago when many states were resisting testing and higher standards.

The measure of a good education program is whether it is helping kids. Despite Somerby's understandable distress at that 27 percent passing rate for last year's third grade, Maury kids got more help and the school as a whole is doing better.

Because of No Child Left Behind, the Alexandria superintendent transferred Lucretia Jackson, one of the best principals I have ever seen in action, to Maury and gave her a carefully selected staff of teachers to work with. Raising the achievement of low-income students is not easy, but it can be done, and Maury is one more example of that.

Somerby derided the federal requirement of annual improvement because "especially in a small school like Maury, one group of third-graders may not be as capable as the group from the previous year." That is a good point. Both the states and the federal government are moving toward a cohort assessment system where progress will be measured by how much this year's fourth grade improved over the performance of those same children the year before.

But I object to one implication of Somerby's remark -- that children are stuck with whatever capability they have demonstrated by third grade and cannot be expected to get much better. Since I wandered into Garfield High School 23 years ago and found that that inner city Los Angeles school was outperforming all but four high schools in the country in Advanced Placement test participation, and beating the national passing rate on the tests, I have been convinced that the majority of Americans are wrong to think kids from low-income backgrounds cannot be expected to achieve at high levels. And this column, as regular readers know, has been full of other examples of that, because it is No 1 on my list of obsessions.

Improving schools is a messy process and hard to measure, as the Maury example shows. I wish there was a way to clean up the most annoying parts of No Child Left Behind so that Somerby and I would not have to work so hard to figure out what is going on.

But that is the way progress occurs in a democracy, by fits and starts. Despite that embarrassingly low 27 percent passing rate in third grade, those Maury students are getting better, and that is the most important thing.