NEWS

[2008-04-23]
Education Secretary Offers Changes to ‘No Child’ Law

April 23, 2008
Education Secretary Offers Changes to ‘No Child’ Law
By SAM DILLON
Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings used her executive powers on Tuesday to propose a series of ninth-inning regulatory fixes to President Bush’s signature education law, No Child Left Behind, including requiring states to use a single federal formula to calculate and report high school graduation rates.

Ms. Spellings also wants to require schools to notify parents of their right to transfer students out of failing schools two weeks before the start of each school year, and to explain more fully to parents the opportunities for federally financed tutoring that are available to students attending troubled schools.

Ms. Spellings said she was proposing the fixes because efforts in Congress to rewrite the legislation have stalled and because “everywhere I go I meet parents who are demanding change.”

“While I will continue working with legislators to renew this law, I also realize that students and families and teachers and schools need help now,” she said Tuesday in a speech in Detroit. “So at the president’s request, I’m moving forward.”

The Democratic chairmen of the Congressional education committees, Senator Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts and Representative George Miller of California, expressed tepid support for some of the proposed changes, although Mr. Miller called several of them “unhelpful.”

A Democratic aide on Mr. Miller’s committee said they included new rules related to a federally financed after-school tutoring program, a hotly debated topic when Congress sought to rewrite the law last year.

Ms. Spellings will issue final regulations in November, and they will take effect one month later, the department said.

The No Child law requires states and high schools to report their graduation rates to the federal government, but allows them to set their own formulas for calculating them. As a result, states have adopted an array of contrasting formulas, most of which understate the number of dropouts, and official graduation rates are not comparable from state to state.

Ms. Spellings’s proposed regulations would require states to calculate their graduation rates in a uniform way by the 2012-13 school year, using a formula that in 2005 all 50 governors agreed to adopt. In the years since, only a dozen or so states have done so.

Under the formula, graduation rates are calculated by dividing the number of students who receive a traditional high school diploma in any given year by the number of first-time ninth graders who entered four years earlier, adjusted for students who transfer in and out.

Some education experts and lobbyists said the proposed regulations were so sweeping that they amounted to an effort by Ms. Spellings to amend the law through regulation.

“This is the boldest sidestep around the Congress that I’ve ever seen,” said Bruce Hunter, a lobbyist for the American Association of School Administrators. “She’s trying to rewrite the law without benefit of Congressional action. I’d be surprised if lawmakers let this go.”

Bruce Fuller, a professor of education at Berkeley, said the graduation rate proposal and others amounted to “an imperious new set of mandates,” while others seemed aimed at giving states the flexibility they have demanded in enacting the law. “The Bush administration is like an ambivalent big sister who doesn’t know whether to scold or to nurture her younger siblings,” Dr. Fuller said.

Mr. Kennedy said the proposals “include important improvements for implementing No Child Left Behind, even as Congress considers further reforms to the law.”

Mr. Miller called Ms. Spellings’s proposals “a series of piecemeal changes to a law that really needs a comprehensive overhaul.”

Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company