‘No Child Left Behind’ implementation is numbers game

State and local education officials are struggling to produce timely, accurate data to meet requirements under the 2001 No Child Left Behind Act, which holds schools accountable for student test scores in reading, math and, next year, science, according to a Government Accountability Office report released this week.

"More than half of the state and school district officials we interviewed reported being hampered by poor and unreliable student data," the report (GAO-04-734) stated. In Illinois, for example, officials said that about 300 out of more than 1,000 districts had inaccurate data.

The law greatly enhances the role of the Education Department, which has in the past taken a back seat to state and local governments. In putting the law into effect, though, Education sought to recognize the variations among states-such as demographics, achievement levels and existing tests-by customizing the rules for each state.

State officials developed plans for implementing the law, which Education officials approved. While the basic premise of the law remains consistent from state to state, the tests, starting points, yearly goals and the formulas by which states determine whether schools have met goals can be very different.

This is where the mathematical challenges begin. Each state must collect, sort and process data according to a different set of parameters, which can be highly specific. The law says, for example, that the test scores from certain segments of the student population, such as low-income and minority children, must be counted separately to make sure that they meet the same targets as the student body at large. But schools that don't have large enough groups of these students don't need to count them separately. The minimum number of students that can constitute a group varies by state.

In California, officials said the quality of information on students' ethnicities, which determines whether they are counted in subsets of the student body, wasn't consistent across districts. Counting the test scores of students with learning disabilities and students who are not native English speakers has become especially complex, in part because of concessions the Education Department granted earlier this year, after states complained that the law's goals were unrealistic.

Time is another factor. Many states test students at the end of the school year and didn't have enough time to do the data analysis before the start of the next academic year, as required by the law. The results determine what changes a school must make, such as offering students tutoring services or the opportunity to transfer to a better-performing school.

GAO reported that officials in 12 out of 21 states attributed the delays in reporting test results in part to "the lack of clear and timely guidance and information from Education." The report said Education is working to monitor states' data quality and to establish a set of standard definitions for types of data.