October 19, 2011

Minnesota Moves to Exempt Itself from No Child Left Behind

By Drew Miller, published on 8/15/11 in the RitchfieldPatch

Richfield Public Schools Superintendent Bob Slotterback thinks the law has been bad for education.

On Aug. 8, 2011 Gov. Mark Dayton announced that Minnesota would seek exemption from the federal No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB). The announcement followed on the heels of Secretary of Education Arne Duncan’s notification that the federal government would begin granting waivers to states it believed were satisfactorily improving schools on their own.

Richfield Public Schools Superintendent Bob Slotterback greeted the news positively, although he didn’t yet know anything about the exemption’s details. Slotterback said the law has had problems from the start. “Conceptually [NCLB] is a good idea, but like many concepts, if it’s not constructed in the right way, it becomes a failure,” Slotterback said. “And that’s exactly what happened with No Child Left Behind.”

Gov. Dayton’s announcement came just before the Minnesota Department of Education released scores for the Minnesota Comprehensive Assessment (MCA) in Science on Friday.

Amongst a slew of data about student scores across the state, this year’s MCA testing in science revealed that, between 2010 and 2011, Richfield Public Schools doubled the percentage of its fifth-grade students with proficient scores on the exam. Slotterback said inefficient means of comparing student improvement–looking at how effectively students improve in one school or district –was just one area where the law wasn’t working. “We’ve been lobbying hard as [federal legislators] re-authorize No Child Left Behind to build in some type of improvement component,” he said. “Our students … are growing faster than the average student.”

Slotterback conceded that the law had enacted some positive changes as well.

To read the full story click here.

Filed under: Government,NCLB

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