States help schools hide minority scores

AP ^ | April 17, 2006 | By FRANK BASS, NICOLE ZIEGLER DIZON AND BEN FELLER

[ConservativeStatement]

States are helping public schools escape potential penalties by skirting the No Child Left Behind law's requirement that students of all races must show annual academic progress.

With the federal government's permission, schools aren't counting the test scores of nearly 2 million students when they report progress by racial groups, an Associated Press computer analysis found.

[.cnI redruM]

This is nothing new. I love the chapter of Freakonomics where he catches Chicago's Public School teachers cheating on the big exam by bubbling in student answers for them.

[mlc9852]

I wonder what Jesse Jackson thinks about this?

[noobiangod]

"minority scores"

I wonder if those include the Asians and Indians with 4.0 GPAs?

[blueminnesota]

Why do they group scores by race? I think that's ridiculous right there. And it can only lead to more affirmative action crap. Put the underachievers in remedial classes and that's it. What has their "race" got to do with it? As if race can even be classified with any accuracy.

[Doogle]

democrats+teachers unions=cheating

hmmm...why is that hard to understand?


Doogle

[ICE-FLYER]

Amazing at how people do not see what this really is. It is both favoritism and racism and insult.

Favoritism as it favors one group needing to both be helped in proper fashion as well as be challenged because they ARE capable.

Racism as you will not see this for underacheiving Whites.

Insult as it reflects the poor standards that mostly union teachers do not want to be held accountable for. Their failed left-winged world view which espouses social promotion as well as sets low goals and fails to acheive will always produce this kind of deception.

[Gordongekko909]

I wonder if those include the Asians and Indians with 4.0 GPAs?

"Bush's home state of Texas - once cited as a model for the federal law - excludes scores for two entire groups. No test scores from Texas' 65,000 Asian students or from several thousand American Indian students are broken out by race. The same is true in Arkansas."

[mlc9852]

I doubt it - lol.

[noobiangod]

Well I was thinking more along the lines of Indian Indians from India.

I wonder what reason they would have for not including the scores of native American Indians in TX and AR?

[Gordongekko909]

I don't know how self-described native Americans perform on standardized tests, but if South Dakota is any indication of the state of native Americans, I'd say the answer is "not well."

[Tulane]

My college roomate (from Sri Lanka) would respect this question!!! The "test-are-biased-whites-argument" drove him nuts (1600 on the old SAT).

[TC Rider]

"I can't believe that my child is going through testing just like the person sitting next to him or her and she's not being counted," said Angela Smith, a single mother. Her daughter, Shunta' Winston, was among two dozen black students whose test scores weren't broken out by race at her suburban Kansas City, Mo., high school.

I can't believe she named her kid Shunta'! Talk about going through life with two strikes against you.

[CurlyBill]

I wonder what Jesse Jackson thinks about this?

It depends on whether there's any money in it for him.

[geezerwheezer]

The old accounting trick is in play here....now you see it...now you don't! Figures lie, and liars figure, so what else is new? It costs much more to send them to school but the end result is a joke on the taxpayers, and we wind up with really stupid kids as a result.

[Tulane]

So sad isn't it? I guess that's what happens when 70% of the underperforming segment of the population is born into a one parent/ multiple child household---their grades suck. Who woulda thunk it?

[Eska]

American Indians raised outside the traditional reservation or village do well academically and in life.

Access to jobs, high quality education, and the American Dream versus a community that suffers massive alcoholism, child abuse, and schools where 80% of the children are FAS and educationally retarded.

Quite a few natives I have known have tried their best to get their kids out of the village and into urban areas so they don't die before age 25. They still remain culturally native but have a chance at what we'all consider success.

And ya know what; even the Natives that do this realize they are the lucky ones, as there is no way the village will ever become economically viable as a community.

[Betty Jane]

Each child's scores are confidential. But the percentage of success and failure must be known. The problem comes when you have a handful of minority students in a school. Let's use Asians, for example.

Say there are 10 Asian kids in a school. The results for the test go out to the district residents. The school hit an 88% passing rate. But three of the ten Asian kids performed poorly. It's not going to take a whole lot of detective work to figure out who the three are.

30% of the minority group are below grade level. The whole school could be penalized because of 3 specific kids, who happen to be minority. The vitriol those kids face could be horrendous.

By the way, I think kids should be tested, but the racial classifications have to go.

[Gordongekko909]

I read in Freakonomics about some woman who named her daughter "Temptress." She wanted to name her "Tempest," but apparently screwed it up.

[george76]

The union is doing a good job protecting the union workers.

The teachers union goals...protect the union bosses, then the union members...