Educational triage under No Child Left Behind

As part of my ongoing explanation of life in the Brave New World of education, I thought I'd expound on the notion of what I call "educational triage" -- the exercise of taking the students barely missing the MCAS, and focusing on them. These students, often called "bubble kids", receive a disproportionate amount of time in professional development, curriculum meetings, and department analyses.

You see, under the MCAS, a student can receive four scores: Advanced, Proficient (both passing), Needs Improvement, and Failing. The cut-off for "Proficient" is a score of 240.

Schools are ranked, tested, rewarded, punished, and in general judged by the proportion of students who are "proficient or better". That's it. No bonus points for advanced, no comparison of who's failing badly, and who's failing miserably. Many times have I seen a kid scoring "failing" essentially abandoned as a lost cause for the school. Here's an example to clarify:

Student	Initial Score	Second Score
Ming*	195	235
Khaled	245	285
Alex	235	245
Passing = 240+

Under nearly every way that the bureaucracies of Massachusetts and the United States assess schools, the only improvement there that counts is that of Alex. An improvement 4 times as dramatic by Ming or Khaled means nothing. Zero. I've seen disastrous empirical analyses of scores by people who supposedly know better, because only "proficient" students were counted, and ignored those scoring "advanced" ignored, resulting in severe underscoring of districts. (Nothing earns you the contempt of a curriculum specialist more than asking "what about students who score advanced?")

Because getting a student from barely surviving to flourishing gets you nothing under this system, just as helping a student get from unable to write their name to almost passing is viewed officially as a waste of time, we do triage. Students are prioritized. Wanna guess which ones?

Right. The Alexes of the world get all the attention and coaching. I'm aware of classes tailored to these students, wherein the Khaleds and Mings of the class are essentially left to their own devices. The Alexes within a grade are identified, and targeted on an almost daily basis. Hopefully Ming doesn't drool on herself, and Khaled doesn't get so bored he starts disrupting the class. "Successful" schools are those that abandon their supposed mission to get Alex where s/he has to go.

This is another aspect of our system. Everything from funding cuts and state takeovers to rewards and publicity depends on turning "Needs Improvement" into "Proficient", and it's sweet to turn an occasional "Failing" into "Proficient".

In the Age of Accountability, these are the only students districts are truly accountable for...so it's a small wonder that these are the only students many districts are truly interested in.

*I've taken over a dozen education courses in almost as many forms, and I've yet to meet an education instructor/professor/facilitator who doesn't rely exclusively on names of Western European origin for their examples -- everyone is Billy or Sally. I've had classes focus on integration in the classroom, and never heard mention of any name that isn't straight out of Germany or England. Hence, I try to use non-Western names in my examples...no racial stereotyping is meant or implied.