Eighty California schools got “out of trouble” with No Child Left Behind in the past two years by changing the way they classify their students, according to an analysis by the Sacramento Bee. The changes enabled the school to alter their status from failing to passing under the law.
The paper cites the example of Sacramento’s Will C. Wood Middle School. Last August, most of the school’s students had met benchmarks set by No Child Left Behind. But African American students’ math scores fell far short. “One hundred students were categorized as black when they took the test last spring. But if the school had fewer than 100 students in that group, their low scores wouldn’t count,” the Bee reports. “So Principal Jim Wong reviewed the files of all the students classified as African American on the test, he said, and found that four of them had indicated no race or mixed race on their enrollment paperwork. Wong sent his staff to talk to the four families to ask permission to put the kids in a different racial group.”
“You get a kid that’s half black, half white. What are you going to put him down as?” Wong told the paper. “If one kid makes the difference and I can go white, that gets me out of trouble.”
A pretty extraordinary admission for a principal to make on the record. And quite a job of reporting on the games schools play by the Sacramento Bee, which notes California doesn’t verify whether the changes schools make accurately reflect the students they serve.
