Kentucky NCLB scoring errors did impact schools

We first surfaced this story here on September 28th, one week after the 2009 NCLB scores were released. Schools were complaining that their NCLB results were wrong because those test results didn’t have the right student counts for kids with learning disabilities.

We added to the story here, here and here.

Now, the first findings have trickled out in a regional news report. The Kentucky New Era (Subscription) says that at least one school and a school district in its readership area just got their No Child Left Behind (NCLB) classifications revised upward due to those errors in the counts of learning disabled students.

So far, there is no overall report from Frankfort about the number of schools and districts that are impacted. There likewise is no report on how this important mistake happened.

I hope the Kentucky Department of Education will collect all of that data for us in one, forthright news release. Information I’d like to see includes the listing of each school and district that got erroneous scores back in September along with the new NCLB classification. I’d also like to see a summary of the expenses involved to support NCLB consequences in those schools and districts that really were not required. We have to pay for such things as assistance in schools that fail NCLB, and schools sometimes have to offer extra, expensive tutoring, as well. So, this error is important, and we need to see exactly what happened and why, and what is being done to fix the problems.