Adequate progress

During the 2006-07 school year, 218 Clark County public schools showed "adequate progress" under federal No Child Left Behind standards. In 2007-08, the number of schools showing "adequate yearly progress" dropped by 32, to 186.

In 2006-07, the Clark County School District had 35 schools on the state's "needs improvement" watch list. In 2007-08, that number almost doubled, to 66.

Yet the school district has awarded itself an "A" for its 2007-08 performance under the federal standards, Deputy Superintendent of Instruction Lauren Kohut-Rost explained Thursday, based on the fact the district met 94 percent of 12,987 federal benchmarks.

"That's an 'A' grade we're giving ourselves," Ms. Kohut-Rost said. "We're extremely proud of the Clark County School District for making AYP for the second year in a row. That's almost unheard of for a very large urban and very diverse school system."

The district has made progress in some areas, without doubt. In 2003, only 29.7 percent of elementary school students who qualified for free and reduced-price lunches because they live in poor neighborhoods were meeting their proficiency targets in English language arts. In 2008 that number rose to 43 percent.

The up side of No Child Left Behind is that there are, at least, some external standards, and those standards are supposed to be inching upward each year, making it all the more impressive that Walker International and John Miller elementary schools earned "exemplary" status -- though there were just the two.

The down side of No Child Left Behind is that it creates even more paper-pushing bureaucracy in an attempt to measure such progress, and then measures that progress in percentiles. While 43 percent of poor kids mastering basic spelling and sentence construction is certainly an improvement over 29 percent, it's still, by any objective standard, abysmal.

On the other hand, the Advanced Technology Academy lost its top ranking because it could not show any improvement in the percentage of students judged proficient in math and English -- a pretty tough thing to do when last year's proficiency ratings were already 98 and 99.5 percent.

At heart, while politically popular, the danger of No Child Left Behind is that gifted students -- tomorrow's leaders -- receive even less attention than previously, while inordinate resources are poured into boosting the test results of a small number of poor-performing kids who may be holding down an entire school's ranking.

That such kids are no longer ignored -- that everyone is pulling for them to do better -- is great. And the district is to be congratulated for the progress it's made.

But as the schools transform further and further into social welfare agencies for the limited, the troubled, and the afflicted, who is watching to make sure the hardest-working, best-performing students are challenged to move ahead at their best possible pace, rather than marking time in tedium, waiting for others who may never catch up?

Anyone?