White House looks to improve No Child Left Behind

An Associated Press story reports today that the Obama Administration wants to make changes to the No Child Left Behind law. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan plans to make a speech about this today in a meeting at the Education Department with leaders of more than 160 groups. Today's will be the first in a series of meetings with the groups. Sec. Duncan said the administration wants their input before making a formal proposal to rewrite the law.

According to the story:

Duncan credited the law for shining a spotlight on children who need the most help, according to a speech prepared for delivery Thursday. No Child Left Behind pushes schools to boost the performance of minority and poor children, who trail their white peers on standardized tests.

Duncan agreed with critics that standardized tests are not ideal measures of student achievement. Yet "they are the best we have at the moment," Duncan said.

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While the law has helped improve the academic performance of many minority students, English-language learners and children with disabilities, critics say the law is too punitive: More than a third of schools failed to meet yearly progress goals last year, according to Education Week, a trade publication.

That means millions of children are a long way from reaching the law's ambitious goals. The law pushes schools to improve test scores each year, so that every student can read and do math on grade level by the year 2014.

Opponents say that the law's annual reading and math tests have squeezed subjects like music and art out of the classroom and that schools were promised billions of dollars they never received.

Norwalk has been labeled a district "in need of improvement" according to NCLB, as have many of Norwalk's schools. The district has placed a lot of emphasis on test scores in recent years as a result of NCLB.

Since Norwalk has a sizeable population of English-language learners, special needs children and low income students, any proposed changes made to the law would have a direct impact here.