Learning Strategies

A Boston Globe article on October 3, 2004, included Weston High School among the schools cited by the Department of Education for failure to make Adequate Yearly Progress on the No Child Too Far Ahead Act. Sorry, I mean the No Child Left Behind Act. That article got quite a bit of publicity; schadenfreude is always a good way to sell papers.

And a much more recent Boston Herald article (June 24, 2005) said this:

Weston High School topped Boston Magazine’s list of best public high schools last year, and students at Ephraim Curtis Middle School in Sudbury were among the state’s highest scorers on the MCAS.

Yet both schools were labeled as “failing to make adequate yearly progress (AYP)” and face penalties under federal and state No Child Left Behind laws, highlighting a growing problem with classifications that don’t mirror the real quality of kids’ education or performance, state educators and parents say.

“There is something wrong with this picture. It doesn’t make sense,” said Ed Moscovitch of Cape Ann Economics, joining members of a coalition of educators, school administrators and parents in releasing a report based on his finding that 75 percent of the state’s schools will fail to make AYP for two years or more over the next decade.

And then...oops...it turns out that the DOE had made a statistical error. We’re making Adequate Yearly Progress after all. The Herald didn’t know this because there had been no publicity for the correction, of course.

None of this eliminates the Achievement Gap, nor the very real need to do something about it.

Labels: teaching and learning, Weston