Failure Rate of Schools Overstated, Study Says

by Sam Dillon, NY Times

When the Obama administration was seeking to drum up support for its education initiatives last spring, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan told Congress that the federal law known as No Child Left Behind would label 82 percent of all the nation’s public schools as failing this year. Skeptics questioned that projection, but Mr. Duncan insisted it was based on careful analysis.

President Obama repeated it in a speech three days later. “Four out of five schools will be labeled as failing,” Mr. Obama said at Kenmore Middle School in Arlington, Va., in March. “That’s an astonishing number.”

Now a new study, scheduled for release on Thursday, says the administration’s numbers were wildly overstated. The study, by the Center on Education Policy, a Washington research group headed by a Democratic lawyer who endorses most of the administration’s education policies, says that 48 percent of the nation’s 100,000 public schools were labeled as failing under the law this year.

The center is the only research group that has compiled an annual report of how many schools nationwide have run afoul of No Child Left Behind. The center calls its 48 percent figure an estimate, but it is based on a tally of schools that 49 states have reported as failing. (New York has not yet released its 2010-11 figures.) Final numbers are not expected until next year, but the center said the 48 percent estimate was unlikely to change by more than 1 percentage point.

full: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/15/education/education-secretary-overstated-failing-schools-under-no-child-left-behind-study-says.html

see also the NYT article "Profits and questions at online charter schools".