Spellings Announces Reforms, and the World Yawns

So the Bush administration has proposed NCLB reform. Margaret Spellings today proposed two major reforms to the way that states do business. First, all states will now be required to report dropout rates according to the same standard. That seems like a really good idea since even my school administrators have no idea how our dropout rate for 2006-2007 was calculated by the state (somehow, we made AYP). Moreover, that will, for the first time, let us compare how Baltimore is doing to how, say, Detroit is doing.

Secondly, failing schools would have to do a better job of informing parents of their tutoring or transfer options. This seemed particularly timely since we talked in class about it last week. And this is the requirement most likely to affect us on the school level. In theory, this could pretty much destroy BCPSS. If every parent—or even a substantial number of parents—at failing schools take advantage of their rights to transfer their students, administrative costs would skyrocket, and it would be nearly impossible to balance school sizes. (I’m pretty sure that this was part of the motivation in ending the idea of zoned schools.)

I’m pretty sure that in the end this will have relatively little effect in Baltimore, though. First of all, it’s been shown that if you obfuscate the data enough, parents won’t act, so if the city doesn’t want to follow the spirit of the law, they really don’t have to. Secondly, my experience suggests that even if a school tries to convince parents to have their high school children participate in after-school tutoring for things like Algebra or Government, as my school has, kids still won’t show up in significant numbers. Overall, then, the changes Spellings announced probably won’t have much of an effect here.