School tests and the No Child Left Behind Act

Steve Sailer:

The corrupt hole at the heart of the No Child Left Behind law is that states get to make up and manipulate the tests by which the federal government evaluates their progress toward meeting NCLB goals. That should have been obvious all along that NCLB was utterly undermined by this built-in conflict of interest, but the truth was that NCLB is just a feel-good fantasy law. Mandating that all students score as "proficient" on achievement tests by 2013 is simply a demand for the states to corrupt the test.

By the way, one of the more subtle purposes of making the tests easier it to make it look like the racial gaps are narrowing. That's because journalists always measure the racial gap by the simple minded use of percentage point differences rather than by standard deviations. For example, if in Year 1, 84% of the whites 50% of the blacks pass, then the racial gap will be reported in the newspapers as 34 percentage points. Then say the test is made much easier so that 98% of the whites and 84% of the blacks pass. Well, then the racial gap has "narrowed" from 34 to 14 percentage points, so, whoopee, cash bonuses for everybody! But, of course, the racial gap is still about one standard deviation.

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