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Washington, D.C. - Congressmen Kildee (D-MI), Congressman Miller (D-CA) and Senator Kennedy (D-MA) called on Education Secretary Rod Paige to show greater flexibility to schools that could benefit from the improved No Child Left Behind rules the Department recently issued. Under the new guidelines, many of the schools now being labeled “nonperforming” would not be.
“The Bush Administration is doing a disservice to schools and teachers across this country by not allowing these regulations to apply to assessment results from last year,” said Rep. Dale Kildee (D-MI), the senior Democrat on the Subcommittee on 21st Century Competitiveness. “Our schools are working hard to meet the standards set by NCLB, but the Department of Education is denying them the opportunity to have their academic results fairly judged. Our letter to Secretary Paige calls on the Department of Education to implement these regulations in a fair and consistent manner.”
“Teachers and school administrators are doing their best to comply with the No Child Left Behind Act, but their efforts have been frustrated by an Education Department that has provided guidance slowly and inconsistently,” said Rep. George Miller (D-CA), the senior Democrat on the House education committee and a key author of the law. “Finally the Department has issued new rules, but the Secretary refuses to let schools utilize the new criteria. So thousands of schools will unnecessarily be labeled as nonperforming. It makes no sense.”
“While the Bush Administration delayed and failed to issue clear rules, the accountability clock kept ticking for thousands of schools,” said Senator Edward Kennedy (D-MA), the senior Democrat on the Senate education committee and a key author of the law. “That's unfair, and the Administration should come clean by properly enforcing these rules.”
It took two years after the passage of NCLB for the Bush Department of Education to issue guidelines explaining how schools should account for the test scores of disabled and limited-English-proficient students in their calculations of adequate yearly progress, or AYP. Each state defines what constitutes AYP, which requires schools to close the achievement gap between disadvantaged children and their nondisadvantaged peers. |
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