Education secretary meets with leaders in Olympia

By Venice Buhain | The Olympian • Published January 16, 2008

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OLYMPIA – Special-education achievement and the cost of testing and tracking data were among the issues leaders raised at a round-table session Wednesday at Roosevelt Elementary School with U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings.

Spellings, on her third stop of a tour of states on the sixth anniversary of the enactment of the No Child Left Behind Act, said she was seeking comment on how to improve the law.

"We passed the very best law we could with what we knew then," she said about the Bush administration's push for the law. "It's time to look at more sophisticated ways of tracking progress. ... We have come to a place where we can learn some things."

She was joined at the roundtable by Gov. Chris Gregoire, state Superintendent Terry Bergeson, Olympia School District Superintendent Bill Lahmann and other invited guests.

"I think one of the important things that school boards are struggling with is the investments that have to be put in place," said Ted Thomas, a Longview School District board member and president of the Washington State School Directors' Association.

Praise

Roundtable members also praised some of the effects of the law, saying that it has increased school accountability and addressed the issue of reaching the groups students who have not historically achieved at grade level, such as some minority groups.

During Spellings' visit, she announced a $1.9 million School Improvement Grant for Washington to help with schools that are not meeting the federal benchmarks for "adequate yearly progress."

The No Child Left Behind law rates public schools and school districts annually on several factors, including progress toward having 100 percent of students reach grade-level goals by 2014. The grade-level goals are set by each state.

Schools that fail to make adequate yearly progress in the same category at least two years in a row could face consequences, including withholding of federal money.

Last year, amid criticisms of the law, members of Congress circulated several proposals that would have amended it, but none passed.

Bergeson said after the roundtable that she, the governor and other state school superintendents have been lobbying Congress to address their concerns in the law, including the challenges in assessing special-education students and students who are learning to speak English.

Another concern was that the law does not recognize schools that improve but haven't made "adequate yearly progress," she said.

Congress' attempt to amend the law last year "added 1,100 pages to a 1,200-page law," she said.

"And the things that we needed to be addressed were not even addressed."

Venice Buhain covers education for The Olympian. She can be reached at 360-754-5445 or vbuhain@theolympian.com.