Ciolfi and Rotherham: State schools aren't held accountable for struggling students

Like many states, Virginia is asking the Obama administration to allow it to stop enforcing the No Child Left Behind Act. Virginia wants to use its long-standing school accreditation system and only require public reporting of student results — a practice that failed to spur significant improvement nationally during the 1990s — instead of holding schools accountable for closing achievement gaps.

Some changes to the 10-year-old federal law are long overdue, and everyone is exasperated with the inability of Congress and the Obama administration to overhaul No Child Left Behind, which was supposed to happen four years ago. But what Virginia is proposing would abandon too many low-income, minority, special-education and English-language learners across the commonwealth to a second-class education. Rather than seeking to evade the No Child accountability rules, Virginia policymakers should improve the state's outmoded model for accrediting schools and holding them accountable.

Contrary to popular belief, NCLB is not a separate accountability system mandated by the federal government. It rests on top of the curriculum and testing standards set by states. It simply requires schools to give historically neglected groups of students meaningful chances to meet the standards set by the state for all students. Even its critics acknowledge that No Child Left Behind exposed just how little is frequently done to help struggling groups of students. This kind of accountability works. You need look no further than the Virginia Department of Education's annual news releases boasting of gains in reading and math for various student groups during the past few years.

Unfortunately, Virginia's system of school accountability does not disaggregate student results by race, income or other groups that traditionally are underserved by our schools. Instead, Virginia merely sets pass rate targets for all students at 75 percent for reading and 70 percent for math. This means that schools where just three-quarters of the students pass Virginia's tests can appear to be succeeding even if many students are not doing well. The same is true for graduation rates. A school that meets the overall target on the state's graduation and completion index can be fully accredited, even with large gaps in graduation rates.

Take Larchmont Elementary School in Norfolk. It is fully accredited and even won a Governor's Award for Educational Excellence in 2011 and a Board of Education Excellence Award in 2012. Yet it has double-digit achievement gaps in reading and math for minority, low-income and special education students. So while 92 percent of fifth-graders are proficient in math, for instance, just 69 percent of poor students are. Larchmont is not an exception nor is it a terrible school. But there are many schools across the commonwealth where averages obscure what's actually happening to many students — in some cases more dramatically than Larchmont. Neither governors' awards nor other accolades or being "fully accredited" under the Virginia accountability system guarantees a quality education for students.

Meanwhile, although pass rates on Virginia's tests are high, national measures should give us pause about what that means. Sure, 90 percent of Virginia's eighth-graders passed the eighth-grade reading SOL test, yet only 36 percent were proficient on the National Assessment of Educational Progress. What's worse, just 16 percent of black eighth-graders in Virginia and 15 percent of the commonwealth's poor students were proficient in reading on the national test. The national nonprofit Achieve reports that each year 24 percent of Virginia high school graduates arrive at college needing remedial classes.

Obviously, Virginia should strengthen its waiver application rather than cut and run on accountability. If Virginia's application is approved by the U.S. Department of Education, all but 4 percent of Virginia's schools will receive the state's stamp of approval whether or not they are addressing achievement gaps. This will also create an incentive to focus on making sure 70 percent or 75 percent of students pass tests rather than ensuring that all students receive a quality education.

Low-income and minority students in Virginia shouldn't have to look to the federal government for a school accountability system protecting their interests. But because Virginia has so far failed to design a method for holding schools accountable that actually includes all students, the federal law is their last resort. Virginia policymakers control the solution to this problem. They could start designing a more rigorous state system today and then rightly tell Washington to bow out. Instead, this request for a federal education waiver would further obscure the reality of educational performance in the commonwealth and undermine a commitment to the success of our most vulnerable students.