‘No Child Left Behind’ creates a fairytale ending for Houston schools, only to have corruption exposed
David Delgado//The Daily Cougar
Last month, Texas received a No Child Left Behind waiver. Signed into federal law in 2002, the bill established a baseline for every student in the nation, promising to penalize states that couldn’t push them to the standard, but, as the fall comes to a close, that standard’s been thrown a bone: only the worst-scoring institutions will find themselves punished.
The Houston Press’ Margaret Downing saw a case of clear intentions.
“Originally, the idea of No Child Left Behind was that by using standardized testing, the weak areas in a student’s education could be discovered and rectified. Like a diagnostic test on a car’s engine, problems would be identified and repaired. Teachers would be retrained to become better educators. No child, especially no minority child, would be overlooked, and because of that, minority leaders bought into the change big time,” Downing said.
It wasn’t rocket science. Every student would, or should, have passed the respective territory’s standardized exams; TAKS, in Texas’ case, until it was replaced by STAAR. Neither test was particularly difficult for better-off districts, but these weren’t exactly the districts the bill had been drafted for. The rift between “good” and “bad” was so great that the state all but dissolved entire junctures for its inability to improve its respective situations.
When the grades came back, there was no median. Pulling positive results in Katy ISD was one thing, but the further officials delved into the Interstate 610 loop, the quicker the figures began to