Not An Argument For A Growth Model

Associated Press didn't "discover" the small sample loophole in state AYP calculations -- everyone in education has known about it for a while now -- but AP writers Frank Bass, Nicole Ziegler Dion, and Ben Feller seem to have done a bang-up job reporting the cumulative effects -- numerically and demographically -- of the loopholes, and of how states and the USDE have let NCLB get swiss-cheesed.

I first saw this at Joanne Jacobs, but go to Yahoo! News if you want all the online goodies, says the ever-helpful Feller. There's not just a main story showing nearly 2 million exempted scores nationwide, but an interactive table where you can see state, district, and school statistics as well as little video sidebars. For example, 82,000 kids in Illinois were exempted (over half of them black and Latino), and in Chicago 35 percent of the kids at one school (Audobon Elementary) were not counted.