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Study: Half schools don’t meet NCLB
By MJ Lee
12/15/11 

Almost half of U.S. public schools failed to meet the No Child Left Behind standards in 2011, according to a national report released Thursday that advocated for changes to the law. 

Forty-eight percent of public schools nationwide didn’t make adequate progress under the standards – up from the 39 percent in 2010 and the highest failure rate since No Child Left Behind took effect in 2002, the Center on Education Policy report said. 

In 35 states, the percentage of schools that didn’t make adequate yearly progress reached a 6-year high. In 24 states and the District of Columbia, more than half of public schools didn’t make enough progress, while in five states – Florida, Missouri, New Mexico, Massachusetts and South Carolina and D.C. — more than 75 percent of schools failed to achieve an adequate level of annual progress. 

“The fact that half of American schools are considered ‘failing’ under NCLB shows how crudely the law measures the quality of a school,” said CEP’s president and CEO Jack Jennings. “NCLB needs to be changed, and since Congress is hamstrung, the Obama administration is right to move ahead with waivers of NCLB provisions.” 

No Child Left Behind requires that states set annual targets for the percentage of students scoring proficiently on certain performance indicators, including statewide tests. Each state must determine whether its schools made adequate annual progress toward meeting those goals based on test scores from the previous year. 

President Barack Obama formally announced in September his administration’s decision to allow states to be exempt some of the strictest provisions in the No Child Left Behind act. Eleven states submitted waiver requests to meet the first of three deadlines in November. 

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