Administration retooling key part of 'No Child' law
By Nick AndersonWashington Post
The Obama administration will seek to scrap a key metric in the eight-year-old No Child Left Behind law -- the standard of "adequate yearly progress" for public schools -- as it develops a new formula to hold schools accountable for student performance, according to a budget document made public Monday. Under the law, schools are rated on how many of their students pass state reading and math tests. Target pass rates rise each year toward a standard of universal proficiency by 2014 for all groups -- a goal experts have long called utopian. The twin concepts of adequate yearly progress, known as AYP, and the 2014 target for eliminating achievement gaps by race, ethnicity and family income are the bedrock of the public school accountability system. (more...)