Virginia and the NCLB mess Congress left behind
If we needed more proof — and we really didn’t — that Congress abrogated its responsibility by allowing No Child Left Behind to continue as the law of the land, we only have to look at Virginia.
Virginia is the latest state to experience the huge gap between what test scores actually say and what the law says they say. In newly released scores of the 2011 state Standards of Learning exam, 62 percent of of its public schools failed to meet benchmarks in math and reading, compared to 39 percent the year before.
Did the state’s schools suddenly get worse? Of course not. Overall passing rates, as my colleague Michael Alison Chandler noted in this
