No Child Left Behind applied behind bars: City school faces an impossible task educating young inmates to standard.

Byline: Sara Neufeld

Dec. 9--The Eager Street Academy is a Baltimore public school behind bars, with the most troubled student body in the city. Nonetheless, its staff has the impossible job of complying with the federal No Child Left Behind Act. Located in the Baltimore City Detention Center, the school's approximately 130 students -- ages 14 to 17 -- are charged as adults in some of the city's most notorious killings and other crimes.

Many of them had dropped out of school before landing in prison, and about a quarter come in reading at a second-grade level. No Child Left Behind requires schools to give annual standardized tests to all their students, and all students must demonstrate proficiency in reading and math by 2014. Schools such as Eager Street that repeatedly don't make "adequate yearly progress" toward that goal face the public embarrassment of being put on a state failure list, with sanctions that can ultimately be as severe as staff replacement. That leads to demoralized teachers and difficulty recruiting. "It's not that we want to get out of anything, but no other schools I know of have this to contend with," said Eager Street Principal James Scofield. "To look at the data and assess the school,…