The dirty little secret about school accountability
Here is the hidden truth about school accountability: Civil rights groups are some of the strongest proponents of measuring students each year and holding schools responsible if their students aren't making progress.
This point came home again Wednesday, when a press release popped into my email basket announcing that civil rights groups could not back the Senate's proposed rewriting of the No Child Left Behind Act.
The organizations signing onto the release included the American Civil Liberties Union, the NAACP, the National Council of La Raza, the Poverty and Race Research Action Council, the National Urban League, the League of United Latin American Citizens, the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights and the Mexican American Legal Defense Fund.
Those prominent civil rights groups were joined by a range of business organizations, such as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Business Coalition for Student Achievement. And they were backed by a number of state