Maryland wins greater flexibility under No Child Left Behind

Maryland has won relief from one of the most criticized aspects of the No Child Left Behind law, allowing it to avoid rigid federal sanctions and design its own methods for improving schools.

The federal law has been persistently bashed for treating failing schools the same whether they miss the achievement standards by a small or wide margin. But now that Maryland is participating in the differentiated accountability system, it will separate failing schools into two categories: one for schools where students taken as a whole fail to meet standards, and another where one or two demographic subgroups of students fail to meet standards.

“We’ve strongly supported No Child Left Behind, but we have never believed that its one-size-fits-all view of school improvement was a good thing for Maryland schools,” said state Superintendent Nancy Grasmick.

“A school which may be an outstanding school but one where one group of kids, special education students, are failing, instead of labeling it as a bad school, this is going to try to turn that situation around.”

No Child Left Behind requires the percentage of students testing proficiently in reading and math on standardized tests to increase each year until 2014, when 100 percent are expected to test proficiently.

Jack Jennings, head of the Center on Education Policy, a nonprofit research group based in Washington D.C., said the increased flexibility is a logical improvement.

“The state doesn’t have unlimited resources, No Child Left Behind is not well-funded, and so this is an opportunity to focus resources on the schools that are in greatest need” while still helping others, Jennings said.

U.S. Education Secretary Margaret Spellings announced the pilot program Tuesday while in Texas. Five other states join Maryland in the program -- Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Illinois and Ohio -- and Spellings said there are four more slots open. She hoped more would apply and said the program would help Congress assess No Child Left Behind.

It is not the first time the federal government has granted Maryland a break under the law. In 2005, the federal government began allowing Maryland to exclude some special-education students’ scores when determining whether schools have met yearly benchmarks.

msilvestri@baltimoreexaminer.com

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