Would anyone in his right mind have supported NCLB without its provision allowing the exclusion of chronically absent students from school level accountability reports? If schools had not been allowed to exclude the test scores of students who missed 20% or more of class while trying to meet their growth targets, would there be a single high-poverty school in America that had not been labeled as a failure? Of course, some supported NCLB because it would produce an endless series of headlines about failing schools.
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The Buffalo New's Mary Pasciak finally got New York Education Commissioner John King to explain his demand that teachers be held accountable for the test score growth of chronically truant students. King accepted the obvious - "that... Read Post
I would like to offer a modest proposal for updating one part of NCLB’s accountability system: All roads to school improvement in the inner city must go through the family crises that cause chronic absenteeism. The John Hopkins Ever... Read Post
The Baltimore Sun story Absent, Suspended City Students Falling Further Behind on MSAs reports that Baltimore has reduced its chronic absenteeism rate but the achievement gap between students who miss more that twenty school days an... Read Post