Stalling education progress.

The following editorial appeared in the Chicago Tribune on Sunday, Jan. 5:

X X X

The heart and guts of President Bush's education reform plan for every public school in America is contained in this simple requirement: Improve every year.

This requirement does two things. It emphasizes steady progress over time. It also mandates that children in every racial and ethnic group learn more each year. No more hiding them behind schoolwide averages propped up by the highest-performing students. No more allowing lower-performing, often minority, students to falter woefully behind without anyone paying attention.

In the negotiation over the particulars of the No Child Left Behind Act, the Bush administration agreed to leave it to the individual states to determine what would constitute "adequate yearly progress," what schools must achieve to avoid sanctions, including possible closure. That concession, however, opened the door to all manner of wriggling, evasion, avoidance and obfuscation to avoid the tough sanctions proposed in the law.

The intent was to demand that all children show progress, measured by standardized test scores. Not just the well-heeled ones, the motivated ones or the ones with well-educated parents _ all the children. Some of the states, however, have not shown that they intend to live up to the spirit of the law.

States are starting to come up with their own goals for progress in order to comply with the law's ultimate requirement that all students meet or exceed state reading and math standards by 2014.