Posted on: Tuesday, January 6, 2004

EDITORIAL
Reforms cannot be left to schools alone

A report on Sunday by Advertiser Education Writer Derrick DePledge underscores more of the maddening complexities of the well-intentioned but often confusing federal No Child Left Behind education law.

The law expects each and every school to make progress every year toward student proficiency in basic educational subjects, as measured by standards set by the state.

Those that fail to make adequate progress are subject to a variety of sanctions and options, ranging from free student transfers to better-performing schools to free tutoring and even forced school restructuring.

But it is not just the school that must make progress; it is subgroups within the school, as defined by various demographic qualities such as ethnicity and family income.

So if a particular school was doing well overall but was having difficulty with a subgroup of, say, non-English-speaking immigrants, it could be classified as "failing" to improve.

And that's precisely what has happened in a large number of Island schools, DePledge discovered. His report was based on the first detailed demographic breakdown of student performance published by the state Department of Education.

The telling thing is that within many of those sub-groups, the problem is not specifically the school's ability to educate. Rather, it is the impediments to learning faced by students from poor backgrounds who come from troubled families or who did not have the advantages of early childhood education.

That points to what is, in many ways, the cruel hoax of the law. It raises standards and it raises expectations, but it fails to provide adequate tools needed to get the job done. For instance, no extra money for early childhood education is found in the law.

Our schools will do what they can, but they have extremely limited abilities to impact the home environment from which these struggling students come.

The obvious conclusion is that a one-size-fits-all set of standards is both unrealistic and unfair. Schools need time and flexibility to bring struggling students up to their potential. They should not be forced to match a timetable set in Washington.

And it drives home the point that educational excellence is a job for the entire community, which must offer a helping hand not just in the schools but in the families and home environment of our next generation.