15 high schools fail new standards

As students headed back to class in many high schools Tuesday, educators faced a grim set of statistics.

Fifteen of 18 traditional public high schools in Spokane County failed last year to meet new tougher standards set under the No Child Left Behind Act.

That includes every traditional high school in the Spokane school district and every one in the Spokane Valley.

And the standards are scheduled to be ratcheted up twice more by 2014, unless Congress and the new president decide to change the No Child Left Behind Act.

One goal of the act is to close the “achievement gap” between student “subgroups” based on ethnicity, income and disabilities. There are nine subgroups – including one for white students and another labeled “all” – and public schools must make “adequate yearly progress” in every one of them.

Each subgroup is monitored in four WASL-related categories. Each school also is judged either on its on-time graduate rate (for high schools) or whether students have too many unexcused absences (for elementary and middle schools).

Added up, there are 37 ways for a school to fail AYP.

Too many low-income students could fail the math portion of the 10th-grade WASL, for instance. Too many students just learning English could fail in reading. Too many white kids could skip the math or reading portion of the WASL.

If any one of those problems – or any one of 34 others – occurs, the entire school fails to meet AYP.

But really, to complicate matters, the actual number of monitored categories varies from one school to the next, because the state doesn’t count subgroups with fewer than 30 students.

For instance, North Central and Rogers high schools had to meet 17 standards in four subgroups: special-education students, low-income students, white students and all students. But Lakeside, Freeman and Liberty high schools had to meet only nine standards in two subgroups: white students and all students.

Among those schools, only Lakeside met each of its required standards.

Mead High School had 13 standards to meet. But its sister school, Mt. Spokane, had to meet 17.

Mead met standards; Mt. Spokane did not.

Terry Bergeson, the state superintendent of public instruction, last week urged parents not to label any school a failure simply because it failed AYP. She talked about West Side schools that didn’t meet AYP despite showing big improvements on the WASL.

While still expressing support for the federal law and its goals, Bergeson has called for changes in the way No Child Left Behind monitors schools’ progress, calling for Congress to “get real, be fair.”

Statewide, 628 schools in 57 districts fell short in at least one category – double the number from the previous year.

In Spokane County, that included 31 schools – including four traditional high schools – that made the state’s “improvement list,” meaning they’ve fallen short of AYP for two or more consecutive years.

Spokane County high schools on that list were Lewis and Clark, North Central, Rogers and University.