Indiana receives No Child Left Behind waiver

President Barack Obama announced today that Indiana and nine other states will receive a No Child Left Behind waiver. This will give these states the ability to change how they prepare and evaluate students.

Gov. Mitch Daniels said he was pleased to learn that Indiana would be one of the first states to receive the waiver.

“No Child Left Behind was an important step forward, but it needed additional flexibility that Congress hasn’t yet provided,” he said in a press release. “The waiver will make for a fairer system and one that focuses on what matters most: getting the whole system to perform better in terms of student learning.”

The nine other states are Florida, Colorado, Georgia, Kentucky, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Jersey, Oklahoma and Tennessee.

Obama’s move is an acknowledgement that the law’s main goal of having all students even in reading and math by 2014 is not within reach.

Indiana Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Bennet said he supported the announcement.

“Indiana will take advantage of the flexibility we have been granted with this waiver by continuing to pursue policies that produce better academic outcomes for our children,” Bennet said in a press release.

The president’s actions offer flexibility in terms of a viable alternative plan. The states must prove they will prepare children for college and careers, develop strong teachers and principal evaluation systems and set new targets for improving achievement among all students, rewarding the top-performing schools seeking to help the lowest performing.

With No Child Left Behind, schools that don’t meet the requirements for more than two years might face consequences, including busing children to better-performing schools and offering tutoring services.

More schools are failing to meet the law’s requirements, with almost half falling behind last year, according to the Center on Education Policy.

In 2011, despite having more students pass Advanced Placement exams than the state average and students’ average SAT and ACT scores higher than the state, Bloomington High School North and Bloomington High School South were among the “C” schools in Indiana’s public school classification system. The adequate yearly progress component of No Child Left Behind was set up to allow parents to know how well their children are doing in school.

However, in current Indiana law, a school cannot receive any grade higher than a “C” if the school fails to make the adequate yearly progress. The progress ensures groups such as poor children, ethnic minorities and special-needs children do not fall behind the rest of the school’s students.

If this progress didn’t cap the grade at a “C,” both of Bloomington’s high schools would have received an “A” and been deemed “exemplary,” according to the State Department of Education’s accountability website.

In Indiana and the other states granted a waiver, students will be tested annually. Starting this fall, the lower-performing schools in those states will face interventions to be determined by the individual states.

— Claire Aronson