No Child fails logic

The absence of federal mandates be damned, Virginia third-graders will continue an annual rite, searching global maps for regions explored by Juan Ponce de Leon, describing trade in early West Africa and explaining representative democracy’s origins in ancient Greece, among other tasks.

State Superintendent of Instruction Patricia I. Wright decided late last week to pull third-grade history from the cost-cutting fires, preserving a piece of the Standards of Learning program favored even by the exam’s detractors. The Virginia Board of Education gets the last word in a vote Thursday.

That decision, a growing cadre of educators say, should not quell discussion on SOLs, an acronym some contend is apropos for teachers hoping to restore to classrooms the vigor testing has stolen away. From their lips spills a phrase that grates, but a lament that resonates: They must “teach to the test,” or risk the wrath of the federal No Child Left Behind Act, which withholds like a biscuit from a hungry dog federal money from schools that miss the mark in education’s rudiments, reading, writing and ’rithmetic.

Missing the mark is definable by students’ average scores failing to make adequate yearly progress, otherwise known as AYP (another accursed acronym), toward proficiency in core subjects and schools failing to sufficiently nudge ahead minority and remedial students. By 2014, in just five years, every student, every Billy, Johnny and Sally, is to be proficient and every last senior is to graduate.

It is a law regarded by President George W. Bush as his signature domestic achievement, aside, of course, from pouring coal into the bailout engine that now is racing down the tracks headed for a cliff. It is, in fact, utterly ridiculous, and all rational people know it. Bush should expect that each of his beloved Texas Rangers hit .300, rap 30 home runs and drive in 100 runs, all standards of proficiency in batting but standards reached only by the game’s better performers.

No Child has driven improved standardized test scores in reading and arithmetic, and what Bush sought in promoting the law was commendable. He wanted to ensure that schools not only elevated American students’ performance in fundamental areas but also that students at the back of the learning pack were not left adrift but prodded ahead. Devoted teachers want the same, but not all of them and not so much their unions. No Child stands at one side of the pendulum’s swing and those who disdain accountability at the other.

Speakers at a state House Education Committee urged a review and possible revamping of SOLs, which were approved in 1995, preceding No Child by more than a half-dozen years. The aim they suggested would be worthwhile but difficult to apply: reducing time spent preparing for the test. A second step – rejecting No Child, something Del. Chris Saxman, R-Staunton, has suggested – would be exponentially bolder because it would cost schools millions of dollars in federal money, but it also would return control to the places where it belongs, first the state and then local schools.

Far more likely, Virginia will follow other states in siphoning No Child of meaning. Because federal proficiency standards are based on standardized tests written and administered by states, many have adjusted by simply making the exams easier. Reviewing SOLs might well be a precursor to the same move here. So the states make a mockery of their extortionists, and of accountability to Beltway hacks. Meanwhile, federal money flows, the bar lowers and education suffers. Logic is a foul thing.