But, Hyslop said, for schools that have been on watch and warning lists before, it will have a major impact on how they can spend federal Title I dollars, which go to support programs for poor students, on up to the full-scale replacement of administrators and teachers or closing schools.
“It’s extraordinarily important to us,” said Sioux City Community School District Superintendent Paul Gausman. “Those schools that are penalized are going to deal with these negative, punitive actions that really are discriminatory against children in poverty.” . .
The 2001 No Child Left Behind Act requires continual improvement on standardized tests until 100 percent of the country’s public school children are at or above the proficiency level by the end of the 2013-14 school year.
States can apply for waivers to the requirements. Iowa tried in 2012 and was rejected because it does not tie teacher evaluations to student scores.
The state’s 2013 education reform package created a task force to study teacher evaluations and make a recommendation by 2016, but it did not require student data be part of evaluations. . .
"But when it’s used to compare states, to compare students from my district to Sioux City’s district, those kinds of comparisons are not fair," he said.
He said the system measures only a fraction of student achievement.
“This process where you take two or three days out of the year where kids sit down and do the assessments, fill out bubble sheets, is that really an accurate reflection of what went on the rest of the school year? There better ways to tell whether we’re making progress with kids," he said. . .
Illinois and Wyoming are the two other states whose waivers were rejected. Five more states — California, Montana, North Dakota, Nebraska and Vermont — didn’t apply.
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