Some public schools currently considered to be performing well could find themselves closer to the bottom of the class under new testing rules in President Bush’s “No Child Left Behind” act.
The act will turn the heat up on educators by judging schools not just on their overall scores, but also on how individual groups of students within each school perform on standardized tests.
Categories to be assessed include the disabled, blacks, Hispanics and foreign-speaking immigrants learning English.
Education officials admit the stricter accountability measures are a potential bombshell because city and suburban schools with overall adequate test scores could end up on the list of unsatisfactory schools if any of those categories of children flunks the standards.
All schools are supposed to be proficient in reading and math by 2014.
The new criteria kick in next fall.
“It’s going to be tough. You can’t hide behind a good average anymore,” U.S. Department of Education Undersecretary Eugene Hickok told The Post.
“As long as there is an achievement gap among students, the school is not doing well.”
Hickok said students with disabilities had been treated as second-class students for too long – and said that would change under No Child Left Behind.
“This law says special-education [students] have to be tested. It’s no longer acceptable to say a special-education student should not be given the chance to get an education,” he said.
About 150,000 city public school students – 15 percent – receive special-education services.
Hickok said the new requirements would likely drive up the number of city schools on the list of schools “in need of improvement.” Schools Chancellor Joel Klein said that’s a possibility.
State Education Department officials said meeting the accountability mandate for special-education students will be a “significant challenge” for some schools.
“There’s a fairly large gap between the performance of general-education students and students with disabilities,” said Ira Schwartz, the state education director in charge of implementing the sweeping federal law.
“In many cases, the high performance of the general-education students masks the performance of the special-education students.”