No child left behind is working against schools with diverse populations, calling them failing schools no matter how high the actual average achievement of the students at that school. Could it be that an intentional purpose of "No child left behind" is segregated school systems? Don't think the GOP isn't thinking about what they are doing and their legislation is just dumb. They have goals, including segregated education and destroying public education. My congressman, Lynn Westmoreland, was the boob who appeared on the Colbert Report and couldn't name the ten commandments. He also said he'd help balance the budget by eliminating the Education Department. [Lynn is in a 75% + GOP district that I unfortunately also live in. I write him regularly reminding him he has Democratic constituents too. Thanks a lot Georgia legislature for making the districts immune to change. But hey, I'm chasing a rabbit here.]

The AJC shows the idiocy of "adequate yearly progress" as defined in the GOP's testing rubric, designed to prove, regardless of the facts, that public education is failing. Lakeside High School in DeKalb County has long been one of the country's best high schools. People move to get in the district. It's a campus with diverse ethnic groups and language groups, yet they succeed year after year. Their average SAT score is 1092! They failed to make adequate yearly progress, likely because some non-English speaking students, new to the system did not pass this year. Meanwhile the homogenious (segregated) schools passed.

"Southside High School in Atlanta has an SAT average of 812, but the school met the state's testing goals. (Southside also got a state "gold award" for improving passing rates on state tests.) Almost all the school's students are African-American, and most are economically disadvantaged, so it had fewer subgroups to contend with. Southside passed."

Read the whole article.

By the way. Somehow our small system in Fayette County managed to have every school pass. There were only a handful of systems in the state that managed to do this. Our school's average SAT last year was 1117. 1105 the previous year. It's always in that range.