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MSM Gets It Right (Finally) On NCLB "Safe Harbor"

04/07/08

MSM Gets It Right (Finally) On NCLB "Safe Harbor"

04:14:23 am, Categories: Announcements [A]

Some of the best reporting on the No Child Left Behind Act has been coming out of the Washington Post in, of all places, its Metro section.

Today’s piece ‘Safe Harbor’ Offers Shelter From Strict ‘No Child’ Targets offers a rare glimmer of reason amidst a landscape of absolute nonsense, most of which is perpetuated by members of the NCLB Doomsday Cult - the national teachers’ unions and their allies in academia.

The WaPo story shows how "153 [schools] in Maryland, 100 in Virginia and 11 in the District – satisfied the law under a "safe harbor" provision*. It forgives a school for low test scores from one or more subgroups if those students show yearly improvement and if the school scores well on the whole".

Mike Petrilli of Fordham gets it absolutely right: "People who complain that No Child Left Behind doesn’t reward schools that are making great gains, well, it does, and this is how it does that."

What we need are more reporters like Daniel de Vise who decline the usual servings of kool-aid from NCLB’s factually challenged critics.

Science teacher Shelly Hawksford talks to one of her eighth-grade students at Tilden Middle School.

* The safe harbor provision, btw, is not a "loophole" as the piece (and other sources) mistakenly call it. It was explicitly and consciously put into the statute in 2001 by the bill’s authors to allow credit for progress short of the absolute proficiency targets. We’re not surprised, however, that it is now seen as a loophole by those who bought hook, line, and sinker the specious argument by NCLB’s opponents that the bill did not give credit for significant growth.

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