The Irresponible Stupidity of the New York Times

As I have pointed out before, if any major editorial board writing about current events exhibited the twin levels of cupidity and stupidity that the New York Times consistently shows toward K-12 issues, that paper would be out of business. And if Brent Staples has been fired, the Times has found a replacement with an identical store of unrepentant ignorance and an unabashed disregard for the facts. Let me count the ways that intelligent readers are insulted and patronized by Thursday's pandering prompt to the Business Roundtable to proceed with its third-worlding of America and the stupidifying of America’s children:

“The bipartisan Commission on No Child Left Behind, financed by several private foundations to evaluate the law’s effect.”

Untrue. If the Commission had, indeed, bothered to evaluate the law’s effects (see examples here and here), rather than cherry-picking a couple of carefully-excised quotes and charts from reports to support its preconceived conclusions, it would have found that NCLB has done nothing to close the achievement gap (see urban students' 2005 'Report Card' in reading and Tracking Achievement Gaps and Assessing the Impact of NCLB on the Gaps: An In-depth Look into National and State Reading and Math Outcome; has had negative, rather than positive, effects on student learning (get CEPstudy here) by shrinking, rather than strengthening, the school curriculum under the crushing weight of high-stakes tests; has hastened the divisive resegregation of American schools, rather rescuing those left behind; has unleashed a corrupt, extortionate pedagogical orthodoxy based on cooked research findings, rather than improving teaching; and has systematically been used to manufacture failure and to privatize education, rather than improve the public schools.

And here is another paragraph from the Staples thought disorder:

In a suggestion that’s long overdue, the report recommends that colleges and universities, which rely on federal funds, be required to increase the number of graduates qualified to teach in underserved areas like math and science. At the same time, it suggests that school districts with high turnover rates be required to develop plans to train and retain their best teachers.

Now it does not take a graduate of even the public schools to know that colleges and universities have no power in choosing the course of study for college students, nor should they. What takes a few more active brain cells to understand is that another "requirement" placed on top of the existing impossible ones, i. e., 100% proficiency, for urban schools who are hemorraghing teachers will only to serve to reinforce the racist belief that these schools are responsible for the failure that has been mandated to them. Our NCLB system of non-stop testing chain-gangs, scripted Pavlovian teaching, teacher pay rewards for high test scores, and now teacher job security tied to test scores, make it certain that teachers who have any remaining choices in the matter will continue to flee the urban school-to-prison pipeline system, where only the incompetent and the sadistic teachers will remain when the schools are finally boarded up or transferred to Whittle to run.

The NCLB system that the New York Times embraces, and the tougher one they look forward to, promises to exacerbate the problems they, otherwise, would solve--and in the process, solidify the foundations for a new education-psychometric complex where corporate welfare mercenaries ply their dark trades based on a never-ending stream of human misery and failure. Here is part of the latest press release by Huntington Learning, which was offered up to prey on the anxiety of parents just in time to coincide with report cards going home in Virginia:

Huntington also provides the following tips for parents who may be concerned after reviewing their child's report card.
TOP 10 SIGNS YOUR CHILD NEEDS TUTORING
1) Your child's teacher or school counselor recommends it. This may happen at a parent-teacher conference. It may also occur when progress reports are issued, or at report card time.
2) Your child's grades start to fall independent of how hard he or she seems to be working, where before they were improving or holding steady.
3) No matter how long your child spends on homework, it's neither complete nor accurate. This may indicate a lack of basic skills or a weakness in a specific academic area.
4) Caught in a cycle of frustration and failure, your child shows an increasing lack of confidence and motivation.
5) Your child has lost interest in learning.
6) Your child experiences extreme anxiety before tests and exams.
7) Your child is reluctant to go to school, fearing failure and criticism from others.
8) Your child's teacher reports that he or she is acting out, becoming a behavior problem in class.
9) Your child says, "I'm too stupid. I'll never understand this stuff."
10) Your child says, "I give up." Or, worse, you hear yourself saying it.

The fact is, of course, that NCLB is responsible for, at least, Numbers 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, and 10. And, of course, NCLB offers over a billion dollars a year to these mercenaries to solve the problem that NCLB created. Senator Judd Gregg, in 2001, called this child-abuse-for-profit system "getting a foot in the door" for privatization.

As for the New York Times and their complicity in all this, one must ask again when did the Gray Lady get turned into an Old Prostitute?

Uncle Sam Walton Wants You!

If you were impressed by the shock and awe of the Aspen Institute's Commission on No Child Left Behind version of NCLB on steroids, then don't come out of your bunker yet. There is another democracy buster whistling down, this one funded by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the Center for American Progress (Clinton's think tank), and the American Enterprise Institute (Bush's think tank). In the escalating war on education for democracy, you might call it the Coalition of the Well-Heeled.

To be delivered on Feb. 28 with heavy h'ouderves for reporters not assigned to Anna Nicole Smith, Leaders and Laggards: A State-by-State Report Card on Educational Effectiveness has a title that harkens back a hundred years ago to the heyday of eugenics, when the weak and the poor and the immigrant were described as misfits, retards, and, yes, laggards. Today, however, the old-fashioned goal of eliminating or segregating the defective "germ plasm" of non-elites has been been traded up for a new, "progressive," and more virulent strain of economic eugenics that is aimed at the economic and cultural sterilization of the non-elite by the unceasing administering of "education" that guarantees the poor, the weak, and the immigrant will never be good enough to ask for more than their failure allows them.

The corporate takeover of American education, in fact, must be achieved if the American corporate vision of economic sustainability through globalization is to work. And work it must, if power is to remain in the hands of the descendants of the same WASPy Model T set who led that first eugenics wave a hundred years ago. With gaping economic discrepancies today between American workers and the Third World workforce, competition in the global marketplace demands that either the rest of the world's workers be brought up to meet our standard of living--or that American workers be brought down so that we can produce here what we would otherwise import from the multinational sweatshops. Competition, in fact, demands that American workers become poorer in order to sustain economic growth, i.e., to make the rich, richer.

Where does education fit into this? Obviously, self-serving American workers can't be counted upon to place themselves in a state of perpetual exploitation without the help of a national system of educational intimidation that is aimed at achieving workers' complicity in their own unending servitude. Even Friedman knows that the world does not get entirely flat without a good deal of pounding from above along the high spots. As long as American states and municpalities can be bullied, however, into voluntarily adopting the making-stupid-by-testing model of behavioral control of the Business Roundtable and the US Chamber of Commerce, then a nationalized testing and tracking system can be achieved by the less bloody tool of intimidation and constant threat. Thus, the need for this second big smart bomb on February 28 aimed at pushing forward the agenda of making the next generation of American workers entirely and equally stupid. From the Orwellian Center for American Progress:

The Center for American Progress invites you to the release of a new U.S. Chamber of Commerce report, Leaders and Laggards: A State-by-State Report Card on Educational Effectiveness. In April of 2006, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce partnered with the Center for American Progress and Frederick M. Hess of the American Enterprise Institute to assess how well each state’s K–12 education system is preparing students to compete in the 21st century. Unique partners in this endeavor, we share the common goal of creating opportunity for all children to succeed.

Please join us as we reflect on the performance of our nation’s 50 states and the District of Columbia in nine areas including academic achievement, rigor of academic standards, postsecondary workforce readiness, and return on investment. The Center for American Progress and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce will also introduce a joint platform for educational reform. The challenges to preparing a better educated workforce and citizenry necessitates that a wide spectrum of stakeholders join together in promoting substantial education reforms.

Bloomberg Acquires More "Human Capital" from Edison

The Chris and Chris Show gets tighter and tighter:

Chris Cerf, a deputy schools chancellor and former president of Edison Schools Inc., has hired as his chief of staff a former Edison official who ran a tutoring program criticized by investigators who found “questionable practices” in the city public schools. The chief of staff, Joel Rose, was from 2003 until 2006 the general manager of Newton Learning SES, an Edison division established to tutor children under the No Child Left Behind law. Last year, a report by the special commissioner of investigation for the public schools found that Newton had failed to conduct fingerprint and background checks of some workers, offered students gift certificates for attending tutoring sessions, and directly solicited students after being warned not to by the Education Department. After leaving Newton, Mr. Rose served as a consultant to the Education Department. Mr. Cerf declined to comment. An Education Department spokesman, David Cantor, said Mr. Rose was recovering from surgery and unavailable for comment but described his work with the department as “invaluable.

The Missing Link Between Higher Test Scores and Lower Poverty

This week's PEN Weekly Newsblast has up this pdf link to the new article by Anyon and Greene on the institutionalized lie that test scores are going to reduce poverty.

NO CHILD LEFT BEHIND AS AN ANTI-POVERTY MEASURE
This article in Teacher Education Quarterly argues that, although No Child Left Behind (NCLB) is not presented as a jobs policy, the Act does function as a substitute for the creation of decently paying jobs for those who need them. Aimed particularly at the minority poor, NCLB acts as an anti-poverty program because it is based on an implicit assumption that increased educational achievement is the route out of poverty for low-income families and individuals. NCLB stands in the place of policies like job creation and significant raises in the minimum wage which -- although considerably more expensive than standardized testing -- would significantly decrease poverty in the United States. In the article, Jean Anyon and Kiersten Greene demonstrate that there are significant economic realities, and existing public policies, that severely curtail the power of education to function as a route out of poverty for poor people. The weakened role of education in upward mobility vitiates any premise that better scores on achievement tests, and increased education, will secure for low-income folks the jobs and income they need. For more education to lead to better jobs, there have to be jobs available. Even a college degree no longer guarantees a decent job. When the federal government and the business communities rely on education to reduce poverty, the social costs of the failure of such an approach are enormous, and taxpayers shoulder the burden.
http://www.publiceducation.org/pdf/2007_NCLB_Anti_Poverty.pdf

NCLB: Treating the Poor the Same in Order to Justify Inequality and Racism

I ran across this piece from the Nashville Tennesseean that examines the madness that has penetrated the mindset of people like Professor Guthrie, whose unacknowledged racism has found a personally-preferred alternative that he parades about under the banner of ethical necessity. The result is a morally-blind replacement of caring by callousness that demands the same from students living under a bridge as from students who live in mansions on Belle Meade estates:

. . . .The law's ultimate goal is to have every child in the nation's public schools read and do math at grade level and to graduate 100 percent of students by 2014.

Yet, scores of local teachers and parents say that lofty ambition does nothing but set schools up for failure.

Lisa Craig says that no good teacher wants her students to fail. But she, like most of her peers, has students who do — because they have learning disabilities, don't speak English, come from broken homes or don't have homes at all.

"Last year, I had a student who was living under the bridge in town before finally being rescued," said Craig, an eighth-grade teacher at DeKalb Middle School in Smithville.

"Do you think this kid even cared if he scored well on the test, much less that he even had to take the test? So many are from drug homes, divorced homes, homes where parents don't care about them, homes where they don't even have food," Craig said.

A local education policy expert empathizes with that point of view, but says the education system cannot hold special-needs students to a lower standard simply because they have more pressing problems.

"I don't think it would be right to say: 'Oh, you poor low-income Hispanic child, we feel sorry for you. You just need to meet the lower bar over here,' " said James Guthrie, a professor of public policy and education and director of the Peabody Center for Education Policy at Peabody College at Vanderbilt University. "That's not what we want."

Guthrie, who said he favors reauthorization of the law with reforms, said the act "symbolizes a transformation in American schools from an institution that everyone just accepted as it was to an institution whose consequences are now going to be measured."

But some of those consequences, one mom of three kids said, have been placed on teachers unfairly. She has watched educators deal with kids who come to school hungry but who are expected to do just as well as their well-fed counterparts.

"It's a wonderful standard to strive toward, but different schools have different populations," said Kathy Fyke, whose girls went through the Lebanon city schools. Two now attend Lebanon High School and one graduated from college.

"When you have every school system to prepare every child at the same level, it's just a challenge. ... I wish the school wasn't penalized for serving the population it's presented with." . . . .

Stand Up to the Bullies of ELL, Poor, and Special Ed Kids

The greatest reward for a learner or a teacher is to experience those light-bulb moments when the "dawning organization of something new throws into confusion something that was certain before" (Eleanor Duckworth). Such is the case as millions of parents and teachers across the country begin to see that NCLB is designed to leave their children and their public schools behind while sacrificing the most vulnerable children in the process.

The sun is not up yet, however, as witnessed in the following commentary, which focuses on the unfairness for ELLs. The real dawning will happen when the unfairness for special ed students and poor students is acknowledged and turned back.

By Maria Neira
Niagara Gazette

You’ve heard of the schoolyard bully, the one who picks on the most vulnerable children on the playground?

The big bully standing around sneering today is none other than the U.S. Department of Education, and among the victims are some of Niagara County’s most vulnerable children -those who are new to this country and do not yet have command of the English language.

In a policy shift, the bureaucrats in Washington, D.C. earlier this month required New York’s 60,000 newly arrived English Language Learners to take the same grade-level tests as the general student population.

Requiring children to take inappropriate tests far beyond their current ability will likely have disastrous consequences for some Niagara County school districts. With 107 students labeled as having limited proficiency in English, Niagara Falls is likely to be hit hard by this unwarranted, ill-considered policy shift. Lockport, with 190 immigrant students, may even fare worse.

The likelihood is great that many of these foreign-born students — some living in the area for just 12 months — will fail the ELA tests. And, because of the unbending accountability requirements in the No Child Left Behind Act, too many failures will mean that Lockport and Niagara Falls’ schools will be falsely labeled as “in need of improvement” and penalized by the federal government.

Amazing, isn’t it? Despite the heroic efforts of Niagara Falls and Lockport teachers to help the city’s large immigrant population learn English and succeed academically, many of these newly arrived students will fail merely because they are being forced to take an unfair test of their skills. And, as a result, the city schools will be labeled as failures.

The real, measurable progress that districts have been making with these students and others toward closing the performance gap will be obscured. The sea of negative publicity will be devastating for teachers, parents and the city.

Teachers fiercely lobbied the Regents and State Education Department to allow English Language Learners to continue to take an appropriate assessment that would fairly measure their progress in learning to read and write English. This test, which had been used successfully since 2003 and had been recently revised to be better aligned with New York’s learning standards, was not even reviewed by the federal government.

Sadly, the Regents chose to let the U.S. Department of Education’s ruling stand.

Make no mistake, teachers — and their union, New York State United Teachers — strongly support accountability measures. Teachers support well-designed tests that are aligned with the curriculum, and which fairly measure students’ academic progress. These tests are important tools for teachers in learning which children are progressing satisfactorily, and which need additional support.

States and school districts should also be held accountable for the performance of all students, including special education students and recently arrived English language learners.

Yet, requiring new immigrant students who are not proficient in English - and students with moderate disabilities -- to take tests they are obviously not able to pass makes a mockery of both the testing and accountability provisions of NCLB.

Expecting a Niagara Falls eighth-grader, living in this country for a year, to read and write English as well as a native-born teenager is cruel. Requiring disabled students in special education to be assessed on material several academic years beyond their ability is totally unreasonable. Taken together, it amounts to a concerted effort by the federal government to set vulnerable children and school districts up for failure -- and then penalizing them when they do.

Teachers and parents are natural allies on many issues. In Niagara County, there must be a strong voice against unfair, unsound and unreasonable testing policies that pick on the weakest. It’s time to stand up to the bully.

Maria Neira, a former elementary school bilingual teacher, is vice president of the 575,000-member New York State United Teachers.

Lead Poisoning Atrocities in D. C. Schools

WaPo reports today that Marc Edwards, a persistent engineering professor from Virginia Tech, has uncovered evidence through a FOIA filing that shows official manipulation of the lead testing done in DC schools following the 2004 media story on high levels of lead in school drinking water and across the City. So while Spellings pushes for more punishing tests to prove the failure of the most vulnerable, and while Mayor Fenty maneuvers to turn the schools over to private management companies, children and teachers who are the victims of "accountability" are also the continuing victims of lead poisoining through official neglect and cover-up. Who will be held accountable for the atrocity of allowing kindergarten children to be poisoned by lead levels up to 60 times the maximum allowable limits?? From WaPo:

. . . . In February 2004, seven D.C. public schools were found to have high levels of lead. The testing occurred a month after media reports disclosed excessive levels of lead in drinking water across the city. School officials determined that the problem was isolated to specific drinking fountains and not a contamination of the main water line connected to the schools. At the time, water was shut off to the problematic fixtures and school officials vowed to replace them with newer ones.

Marc Edwards, a civil engineering professor at Virginia Tech, said yesterday that he has been studying school lead levels for nearly two years. He said he discovered the problem after studying test data obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request of water samples in the schools.

Officials conducting tests for D.C. schools "did not follow standard protocols [in the tests]. They used methods to make the lead look low when it wasn't," Edwards said.

Test data in an August 2006 report provided by Edwards showed that 10 of 13 water fountains at Watkins contained elevated levels of lead. Still, in a second draw, three of the 13 samples were elevated. Edwards said the standard requires using results from the first draw.

Data from Kenilworth last month showed that six of 15 fountains had elevated lead levels. In a second draw, the number dropped to five. One fountain, in a kindergarten classroom, showed lead levels at 1,200 parts per billion on the second draw, Edwards said. "That is a hazardous level of lead," he said. EPA standards recommend school water fountains should be taken out of service if the lead level exceeds 20 parts per billion.

Last night, schools spokesman John C. White said that since September, all five schools except Deal have either replaced the water fountains or their filters.

"It's unconscionable that parents were not told and children were allowed to drink that water and this has gone on for years," Edwards said, adding that no one responded to his offer to conduct the water tests for free. "I suspect there are other schools with serious problems that they haven't sampled yet."

The National Safety Council has this on the effects of lead on children:

Children under the age of six—and fetuses—are those at greatest risk of the health effects associated with exposure to lead. They are particularly vulnerable because at that age, their brain and central nervous system are still forming. Lead is a powerful neurotoxin that interferes with the development of these systems as well as the kidney and blood-forming organs. Exposure to lead causes a wide range of health effects, and one of the interesting things about lead is that those health effects vary from child to child.

New research published in the New England Journal of Medicine in April, 2003, indicates that children can lose IQ points at levels of lead in blood below the present official CDC level of concern of 10 micrograms per deciliter (µg/dL). More than ten years ago, the National Academy of Sciences wrote that "There is growing evidence that even very small exposures to lead can produce subtle effects in humans [.and] that future guidelines may drop below 10µg/dL as the mechanisms of lead toxicity become better understood." (Measuring Lead Exposure in Infants, Children, and Other Sensitive Populations, National Academy Press, 1993, page 3.) As it turns out, today there is widespread recognition of the fact that there is no such thing as a "safe" level of lead exposure.

Even low levels of exposure to lead can result in IQ deficits, learning disabilities, behavioral problems, stunted or slowed growth, and impaired hearing. At increasingly high levels of exposure, a child may suffer kidney damage, become mentally retarded, fall into a coma, and even die from lead poisoning. Lead poisoning has been associated with a significantly increased high-school dropout rate, as well as increases in juvenile delinquency and criminal behavior.

15 Steps Toward an Alternate Education Universe and a Healthier Society

Advocates of education for democracy are in the fight of our lives. The touring kabuki theatre staged and acted out by the Aspen Institute windbags has concluded, and those naive enough to expect recommended alterations in the abusive and destructive NCLB are gasping today, rather than breathing a sigh of relief. As Monty Neill suggested yesterday afternoon, the Aspen Report is NCLB on steroids, thus making Margaret Spellings appear as the voice of moderation--which, of course, completes one of the prime tasks of the Commission from the beginning.

Anyone, such as the NEA, who believed they could play footsie with the Christo-corporate privatization steamroller got a cold dose of board room reality therapy yesterday with Tommy and Roy's 75 new ways to further make American education the laughing stock of the world. In this high stakes poker game that is about to be played out in the NCLB reauthorization debate, corporate America has gone "all in" for an education pot that includes a half-trillion dollars that Americans spend on education each year.

The fact that democracy's weak sister, the Democrats, have bought in to, while being bought by, the Business Roundtable solution for American education, exposes their culpability in the incredible shrinking American civic purpose of school and the overall destruction of the Republic. And Kennedy's solution to the effective elimination of social studies from school? Of course, a test to turn classroom discussion on America's public values into a catechism on the historic Heroes: "My own hope is that following science [testing], we can get into history."

I do not have 75 recommendations like Tommy and Roy, but I do have 15 that might make a humble start in the search and rescue, or is it recovery, effort for American education. Steal these talking points, please:

15 Steps toward an Alternate Education Universe and a Healthier Society

• Rather than funding school privatization efforts with vouchers and EMOs, rebuild public schools and fund public school choice within and beyond district boundaries.

• Fund efforts aimed at ethnic, religious, and economic integration, rather than devising testing schemes and testing sanctions that incentivize segregation and homogeneity of the weak in urban internments.

• Recognizing that there is no single best approach that fits every learning context, encourage local choice in deciding curriculums and instructional strategies that are grounded in best practices as defined by teachers, researchers, and professional associations that represent the disciplines.

• Base school funding decisions on first addressing the needs of the least advantaged before rewarding those who have demonstrated by their performance that they are the least in need of extra resources.

• Make improvement to struggling schools an integral part of community and family infrastructure support and rebuilding, rather than pretending that school achievement is independent of family income and community health.

• Build assessment systems with local and national components that use multiple measures and multiple methods, rather than a one-size-fits-all approach that really fits no one.

• Build assessment systems that assess understanding, application, and factual knowledge for personal growth and future economic success, rather than using junk tests to simply measure the retention of desiccated facts that are irrelevant to prospering in the 21st Century.

• Rather than defining academic expectations so that the majority of the disenfranchised, the weak, and the poor are sure to fail, build assessment systems that measure progress over time and that match resources with expectations for the special challenges to disabled, immigrant, and poor children.

• Develop a focused school ecosystem intent on building and nurturing the intellectual, civic, physical, and emotional health of children, rather than the maintenance of maladaptive and dysfunctional testing chain gangs.

• Rather than the intensifying the denigration of teaching with canned curriculums, the policing of standardization, and rewards for teaching to the test, rebuild the teaching profession by seeking the partnership of teachers in the shared goal of democratic living, economic autonomy, and creative problem solving.

• Offer research and professional development incentives for teacher education programs to work directly with principals, teachers, and students in schools.

• Offer funds to support universal mentoring for teacher candidates who are required to complete yearlong internships.

• Require elementary education majors to have an additional major in a liberal arts discipline.

• Establish interstate education communications and data links that encourage mutual assistance and shared responsibility among states and municipalities.

• Plan and implement a formalized national dialogue on the purposes and aims of public schools in a democratic republic.

Any other ideas?

Sanity Returns to Kansas

From Reuters:

TOPEKA, Kansas (Reuters) - The Kansas Board of Education on Tuesday threw out science standards deemed hostile to evolution, undoing the work of Christian conservatives in the ongoing battle over what to teach U.S. public school students about the origins of life. . . .

The Charter Magic Bullet Another Dead Round

From the Times Leader:

Associated Press

PITTSBURGH - A decade after the state allowed the creation of charter schools, achievement at most lags behind that of schools in their home districts, according to a newspaper study.

Pennsylvania charter school students on average are not performing as well on standardized tests as their public school peers, the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review reported Sunday. In addition, average scores of charter students fell below the averages in the students' home districts, the paper said.

The state in 1996 authorized the creation of charter schools, and there are now 120 such schools serving 60,000 students. School districts are required to pay for the education of charter school students living within their borders, but the state reimburses districts for only part of the cost.

The Tribune-Review said 49 percent of charter school students scored at the proficient level or higher in reading and nearly 48 percent did so in math. Averages in the state's public schools were 68 percent for reading and 70 percent for math.

Forty-two charter schools reported scores worse than their home districts in reading and math; another 19 did worse on one test and about the same on the other, the paper said. Two dozen schools did better on both tests and eight did better on at least one test, while 12 schools did about the same as their home districts on both tests.

"Evidence around the country demonstrates that those who considered charter schools a magic bullet were wrong," said Ron Cowell, president of the Harrisburg-based public policy group, Education Policy and and Leadership Center.

Gary Miron of The Evaluation Center of Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo has studied charter schools in eight states and says that Pennsylvania's rank in the middle in terms of performance.

Some of the problems in Pennsylvania, he said, include unstable school leadership, districts unwilling to sponsor charter schools, lack of oversight and poorly qualified teachers.

"The reality is, if your kid isn't performing, if you take him out of a regular school and put him in a charter school, he doesn't automatically become brilliant," said state Rep. James Roebuck, D-Philadelphia, who chairs the House Education Committee.

At Propel Charter School-Homestead, students scored 24 percentage points lower in reading and 29 points lower in math than host district Steel Valley's students. But principal George Fitch Jr. said many arrive one to three grades below the appropriate level. He said the students have improved since enrolling. . . .