No White Child Left Behind

Don't ya just wish this were surprising? But because under the Bush administration it just has to look like results, this is pretty much standard operating procedure.

States are helping public schools escape potential penalties by skirting the No Child Left Behind law's requirement that students of all races must show annual academic progress.

With the federal government's permission, schools aren't counting the test scores of nearly 2 million students when they report progress by racial groups, an Associated Press computer analysis found.

Minorities — who historically haven't fared as well as whites in testing — make up the vast majority of students whose scores are being excluded, the AP found. And the numbers have been rising.

"I can't believe that my child is going through testing just like the person sitting next to him or her and she's not being counted," said Angela Smith, a single mother. Her daughter, Shunta' Winston, was among two dozen black students whose test scores weren't broken out by race at her suburban Kansas City, Mo., high school.

Look on the bright side: It's great practice for the future, when your minority child will vote just like the person next to her and she won't be counted.

I guess we will never really know the answer to that rarest of questions: Is our children learning?