According to this report, test scores for 28,000 minority students in Tennessee weren't included in No Child Left Behind evaluations. Experts say that if they were included, some Tennessee schools would not have scored as well, and may have in fact ended up on "watch lists".

According to the article, West View Elementary in Knoxville reported scores for "all 57 white third-graders tested, but no scores for their 24 black and five Hispanic classmates." The article notes that this would be the very same West View Elementary where Bush staged a NCLB promotional photo-op back in January 2004 and said:

"I'll drop a fancy word on you called 'disaggregate,' Bush said. "We're disaggregating results. We're focusing not just on the whole, we're trying to understand whether or not a black child is learning or a Hispanic child is learning.

Apparently not really. Which doesn't make much sense if you think about it. NCLB is the first step towards a long-term goal of eliminating public education through teacher intimidation and meaningless metrics so conservatives can install a voucher system. Lower test scores and more failing schools would theoretically advance that agenda. State and local school systems are apparently skewing the data, though, because they don't want to suffer the consequences. And who can blame them?

Anyway, the underlying question of why minority students aren't scoring as well (or why this is always an automatic presumption) is not discussed. One might wonder if it has something to do with fostering or at best tolerating school environments such as this or this.