NCLB ‘BUS-ted’!

It came as a real shock.

After the new 2009 No Child Left Behind (NCLB) scores released on September 23, 2009, one of the first things I checked was how the 34 schools that were in Tier 5 status last year performed in this new report. These 34 schools are of high interest following our August release of “Examining Kentucky’s ‘No Child Left Behind’ Tier 5 Schools.”

They were Kentucky’s lowest performing schools in NCLB after the 2007-08 school term ended.

We especially wanted to know about two of the 34 schools. The first one was the Okolona Elementary school in Jefferson County, because if this school had done well in 2009, it would have earned its way out of NCLB Tier status. The second school was Atkinson Elementary School. Its principal had been highlighted in a recent KET TV broadcast about the importance of principals in schools. It sounded like Atkinson was a school to watch. Would the principal enrichment program there work some magic for the students?

Then, the shock hit.

When we looked at the 2009 NCLB reporting documents, it turned out that we couldn’t determine if real academic performance in these schools had impacted their NCLB Tier status.

Instead, both schools had escaped all NCLB accountability due to a loophole – a real “Get Out of Jail Free Card.”

Thanks solely to significant changes in the students attending these schools because of the on-going problems of busing in Jefferson County, both schools had their NCLB Tier slates wiped completely clean. It’s as if both schools have a pristine record even though both schools still have the same principals, and probably most of the same staff, that they did last year.

And, these schools are not alone. Jefferson County’s Hazelwood Elementary School and Maupin Elementary School also got their NCLB slates wiped clean.

The 2008 and 2009 NCLB reports for Maupin Elementary (find the Maupin NCLB reports using the Web tool here) provide a typical example of what happened.

The first table comes from last year’s NCLB report for Maupin. Notice that the school consistently failed to make the required proficiency rates in reading and steadily rose in the NCLB Tier system to become a Tier 5 school after the 2007-08 results released. This is shown by the listing for the 2008-09 school year of NCLB Tier 5 in the lower right part of the table.


The next table shows what happened to Maupin in 2009. See the N/A entries under both columns in the lower right part of the table? That means Maupin’s slate was wiped clean. Because of changes in the student makeup at the school, this school’s NCLB “clock” has been completely restarted. That is also why you don’t see the Tier listings from the previous years that appeared in the 2008 report. Thanks to busing, Maupin has ‘BUS-ted’ NCLB accountability.


Now, here is what really makes this accountability program questionable. First, as of the September 11, 2009 update to the Kentucky Department of Education’s school directory, Maupin still has the same principal that served last year. Most likely, the rest of the staff at the school hasn’t changed much, either.

Now consider – even though Maupin had a different group of students in the 2008-09 year, it still failed to teach reading adequately, as the center section of the table above shows. That points more strongly to the possibility that it is the staff, not the students, who are the problem at Maupin. Even though students got bused in from better performing sections of Louisville, the school still failed to teach reading adequately in the 2008-09 school term (and math too, for that matter).

Still, the staff just got a “Get Out of Jail Free Card” for NCLB. Their Tier slate is wiped clean.

There is still more to this unsatisfactory story, by the way. I’ll be talking over the next few days about two other ways NCLB is getting ‘BUS-ted’ in Kentucky. One involves “slate wipes” due to zoning changes, and the other involves a “slate wipe” due to changes in the proportion of federal Title 1 money each school gets. So, stay tuned.

Anyway, these NCLB “Get Out of Jail Free Cards” just are not right. It’s certainly not in the best interests of the kids in this school. When a school has a long history of failure under NCLB, and when the school staff isn’t changed, then we need to look at other options besides totally restarting the NCLB “clock.”

If we don’t get this right, then other educators will take advantage of this loophole, and we’ll wind up with a thoroughly ‘BUS-ted’ NCLB.