NCLB Standards Need Review (Sen. Lindsey Graham)

When you identify a failing school, make sure that the reasons the school is failing make sense. Is it fair to identify a school as failing when the majority of the population may be special needs kids? What we have to do is look at a system that better identifies a failing school and gives more resources to reform efforts to bring it back into compliance, but not back off the idea of identifying poorly performing schools.

It is a national tragedy to have someone in high school performing at the elementary school level. I would argue without No Child Left Behind we would lose that. So I hope we look at a growth model in terms of evaluating performance of schools. You take where the particular student is at (at the beginning of the year) and you look at where they finish at the end of the year. And you have some parameters of growth, and if you’re achieving appropriate growth in terms of educational advancement, that would be complying – rather than just artificial, dead-set, bureaucratic measurements. So if you change No Child Left Behind to determine failing schools on a growth model of performance – versus bureaucratic measurement, you’ll get more buy-in throughout the country.