Your Turn: Mass. Gets Waiver From No Child Left Behind—Good or Bad?

President Barack Obama granted a waiver to Massachusetts and nine other states from the No Child Left Behind law last week, in exchange for promises of higher standards and more creative ways to measure what kids are learning, according to a report by the Associated Press.

The news follows the Bay State’s request last October to opt-out of the requirement that all students demonstrate proficiency in reading and math by 2014.

The presidential waiver grants that request, while requiring each state to submit plans showing how they will prepare students for college and careers; set new targets for improving achievement; reward the best performing schools and focus on schools performing poorly, according to the AP.

The federal No Child Left Behind Act requires schools to make Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP), which uses standardized testing to measure students’ progress towards achieving the federal goal of all students test proficient in reading and math by 2014.

Last fall, a US Senate panel also proposed eliminating the AYP requirement from the No Child Left Behind Act, according to the Christian Science Monitor.

Many Reading schools missed the mark with regards to those federal progress benchmarks in 2011—as did the vast majority of schools across Massachusetts, with 82 percent of the state’s schools and 91 percent of school districts missing the performance targets, according to the Boston Globe.

Two local schools—the and the Schools—missed the mark in the aggregate and all student subgroups for both math and English-Language Arts in 2011, while only School and met all federal standards across the board. 

Here are the school-by-school results for meeting AYP in 2011; click on each school name to view its AYP results back to 2004 and a breakdown of performance by subgroup:

Do you agree with the waiver? Is the 'proficient by 2014' unreasonable? Or is it a firm goal that Massachusetts should stick to in order to keep standards high? Tell us in the comments below.