Reply #3: Its a scam. Its all about selective reporting.

[flashl]

With the approval of the U.S. Department of Education, many states are reporting educational results under NCLB that defy reality and common sense. In so doing, they are undermining the effectiveness of the law.

The result is a system of perverse incentives that rewards state education officials who misrepresent reality. Their performance looks better in the eyes of the public and they're able to avoid conflict with organized political interests. By contrast, officials who keep expectations high and report honest data have more hard choices to make and are penalized because their states look worse than others by comparison.

It's difficult for teachers and students to focus on academic achievement when schools aren't safe. But while a recent report from the U.S. Department of Education and the U.S. Department of Justice found that overall school violence is down, it also found that violence, theft, bullying, drugs, and weapons are still “widespread.” NCLB gives students in “persistently dangerous” schools the right to transfer elsewhere. But in their 2006 NCLB reports, states asserted that only 28 of the nation's 95,000 schools are persistently dangerous. As Table 5 shows, only six states reported any persistently dangerous schools at all.

One of those states, Maryland, set standards for dangerousness based on the number of student expulsions or suspensions for arson, sexual assault, physical attacks on student or adults, and possession of drugs, firearms, explosives and other weapons.

Yet many states created standards similar to those in Arizona, which only labels schools as dangerous if an average of four or more firearms are brought to school for three consecutive years. Arizona ignores rape, gang violence, readily available illegal narcotics, and many other indisputably dangerous things. The state has not identified a single persistently dangerous school.

Students graduating from schools as 95-99 proficient in reading and math must enter remedial courses in college.