Most schools in Great Lakes region will 'fail'under NCLB, study finds

Fewer schools in the Great Lakes region were labeled “failing” this year. That will change, however, if the so-called “No Child left Behind” law continues to provide the key measurement of school and student success, according to a report by the Great Lakes Center for Educational Research and the Education Policy Studies Laboratory at Arizona State University.

Most schools in the region will be labeled “failing” by 2014, according to “The Impact of the Adequate Yearly Progress Requirement of the Federal No Child Left Behind Act on the Great Lakes Region.”

The study is the first multi-state research to use actual state data to predict how schools will fare under the law’s current adequate yearly progress (AYP) requirements. The authors – Edward C. Wiley, University of Colorado-Boulder; William J. Mathis, University of Vermont; and David R. Garcia, Arizona State University – assessed how much gain schools made in 2003-04 and used those data along with each state’s established growth expectations to predict how many schools will meet the federal requirement of 100% proficiency on state high-stakes tests by 2014. It found that about 95% of the schools in the Great Lakes region will be labeled “failing” by 2014.

In a state-by-state breakdown, the report predicts that under the best case scenario more than half of Wisconsin’s schools will fail by 2014. Under a more realistic scenario, 84% of Wisconsin’s schools will fail.

The entire report (pdf file)
Great Lakes Center for Education Research and Practice
OnWEAC Resource Page on the ESEA

Posted September 23, 2005