Apparently there is a major issue surrounding how states judge whether a student has achieved the proper scores to graduate high school. Under No Child Left Behind, the states can customize their own passing standards and then report the numbers of students they graduate every year. Members of Congress feel that this leads to inaccurate numbers and states passing schools that shouldn’t otherwise be passed.
According to the Detroit News article, Education Secretary Margaret Spellings feels that
[there] needs [to be] some truth in advertising,” Spellings said, referring to the hodgepodge of ways states report graduation data.States calculate their graduation rates using all sorts of methods, many of which critics say are based on unreliable information about dropouts.
Allowing the individual states to set their own passing standards is causing a snag in the reporting method and throwing off their numbers. Critics are proposing a federal mandate stating what a student needs to have completed to graduate high school. So much for states’ rights, and for tailoring/reforming No Child Left Behind to actually maybe work. Instead, politicians would rather standardize the standards they use to measure students, and get rid of the “loopholes” in NCLB rather than fix it. Nice.
Uniform Graduation Rate Reporting is Urged
Nancy Zuckerbrod, November 10, 2007
The Detroit News
1 response so far ↓
1
Chris
// Dec 4, 2007 at 5:21 am
That sounds like just one more thing to make it more difficult for good teachers to teach well. After receiving all of this education about how to educate, it seems the government is going to hold my hand and tell me what to do every step of the way. Not only that, but if I try to go explore a new area, they will force me to stay on the path. Despite this impedance to teaching, doesn’t standardizing every students education also make our creative minds of the future much less diverse? I know that students should all get an equal opportunity in the world, but if we equip everyone with the same skill set, then everyone will have the same skills. Seems an obvious and pointless conclusion, but what can people accomplish together if they all have the same skills? Not that much more than if they try to do it alone. I think that, in regards to education, we shouldn’t rely so much on the word “standardize.”
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