| Test score complaints are nonsense |
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Posted: Wednesday, August 12, 2009 10:03 pm
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When the Minnesota Department of Education released its list of failing schools this week, districts around Steele County couldn’t have been pleased. Only one district with ties to the county — the New Richland-Hartland-Ellendale-Geneva school district — was deemed as making Adequate Yearly Progress, or AYP, under the current No Child Left Behind Act. All of the other districts in the county — Owatonna, Blooming Prairie and Medford — did not make the sort of progress that the federal law requires.
That doesn’t mean that the schools aren’t making progress. They are. Take, for example, the Owatonna district. Wilson Elementary School — a school that has a sizable English Language Learner students — has made AYP for two years in a row, and Owatonna High School is no longer on the list of schools that didn’t make AYP. Both Medford Elementary School and Medford High School made the list of successful schools, but because of overall proficiency levels in certain subgroups within the district, the Medford district as a whole did not make AYP.
There will be those, we are certain, who will point to the results and conclude that what is needed is more money for school districts, as if throwing more money at the problem will, by itself, solve the problem. Others will complain that the problem is that the standards keep getting tougher every year. Still others will use the results as a way of lambasting the No Child Left Behind Act, saying that the problem is not with the failure of schools to educate all its students, but with the unreasonable standards of the federal law itself. And they will call for the repeal of the law, as if ignoring the problem will make it go away.
To all these complaints we say nonsense.
The goal of the law is to ensure that all students reach proficiency in math and reading — something we should all embrace. And we should expect and demand that standards keep getting tougher if we want our children to succeed in a world that is growing more demanding. But simply throwing money at a problem never solves the problem.
Owatonna People’s Press editorials are the opinion of the Press editorial board. Other editorials, columns, letters and cartoons appearing on this page are the opinions of the authors and artists and not necessarily the People’s Press.
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