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sub-groups, like boys, or minorities, or students with IEP's (special education students) all of whom must be tracked and shown to be improving. One of the ways, certainly not the only way, but in fact a major way that students are identified for special education is their failure to succeed. After the school follows the federal law and identifies these students as failing to succeed, then we punish the school for their failure to succeed. The sad fact is that many truly good schools have been put on the President's watch list for failure to meet all the criteria for special education student improvement. One way to game the system and improve special education scores would be to put students who scored better into the special education programs to boost the average. Wanna guess if any school has tried that? I don't know specifically if it's been done and I hope it hasn't. I suspect, however, that the schools on the watch list for failure to improve special education scores have been too diligent by only allowing truly disabled students into their programs. As a result, their standardized test score averages don't improve very much.

There's also some sort of rule requiring schools to write goals based on standardized test scores. The goal might be something like, "The percent of 8th grade boys falling below the 40th percentile in Math will decrease in the 20XX - 20XX school year." Or "The average reading score of 4th grade girls will increase for the 20XX school year." Something specific and measurable has to be turned in to the watchdogs. However, it's not too hard to pick out from the current 4th and/or 8th grade classes an area where the students don't succeed well, and then compare that with the current 3rd and 7th grade classes to see if they typically do better. Bingo. There's your goal for next year. This I'm also sure isn't done anywhere. Wanna bet?

It's all just a game. So let's look at some results after six years of this Bush initiative. The overall high-school dropout rate across America is now 25%- the highest since the Great Depression. Admittedly, that rate is artificially elevated by a 70% dropout rate in some inner-city minority student populations. Amazingly, this dropout pattern actually serves to elevate average test scores in some problem schools. Once a slow learner drops out, he or she no longer drags down the average, and by No Child Left Behind standards, things actually look better. I wonder if some young people are ever motivated

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