Grading on the curve

THERE ARE SOME INTERESTING charts in a new study of the No Child Left Behind Act, the Bush administration’s signature achievement in education. Although they don’t show whether the law is helping to improve student achievement, they say volumes about how states are gaming the system it created.

The charts compare how many students are considered proficient in reading and math in each state, compared with how many are proficient on a national test.

In California, 47% of elementary school students come out proficient in reading, according to this state’s standards -- but only 21% of fourth-graders do so on the test given by the National Assessment of Educational Progress. That’s not good.

But look at Mississippi. Only 18% of its students performed well on the national reading test, but 89% scored proficient on the state tests. In Alabama, 22% did well on the national test, 83% on the state tests.

In other words, some states have set the bar so low that they can blithely report to the federal government that almost all their students are meeting the level of achievement required under No Child Left Behind. The comparisons with the national test show that to be hogwash -- and point up one of the main flaws of the federal law: It requires rigid numbers of students to reach proficiency, but the definition of “proficient” can be bogus. It’s whatever a state says it is. Thanks to the report by Education Trust, an advocacy group for disadvantaged students, this is now clear.

That doesn’t excuse California, which is among the lowest-scoring states on the national reading test and which has a long way to go to improve its schools. But at least the state is more honest about its failures, has set strong standards for what it should achieve and has made progress getting there. (But not as much as, say, Massachusetts, which has set higher standards and is getting far more students to meet them.)

It’s not fair for so many California schools to be in trouble under the federal law while low-performing schools skip free in states with painfully weak standards. It’s even more unfair to the students in those states. U.S. Education Secretary Margaret Spellings can help address this injustice by allowing California to measure success by yearly improvement, as the state proposes, rather than by how many students reach the state’s high bar of “proficient.”

Public education is the responsibility of states, not the federal government, according to federal law. But the secretary of education would be wise to put together a panel of educators to devise voluntary national standards. They could serve as a benchmark for grading whether states are setting up their students for failure with overly low expectations. And the secretary -- and the president -- would be wise to use the power of their bully pulpits to promote these standards.

An independent commission of education experts is starting a yearlong examination of changes needed in the federal law. One of its priorities should be the issue of how uneven standards are leaving millions of children behind -- in reality, if not on paper.