Here’s today’s WHYY Newsworks post on the future of No Child Left Behind and NJ’s shift to a more granular system for judging school success:

The election results in: Barack Obama will be a two-term president and the GOP is under treatment for shellshock. What does this mean for the future of the federal legislation No Child Left Behind (NCLB), also known as the Elementary and Secondary Education Act?

Rewind

First a short primer. Historically we’ve judged our nation’s public schools through blurry wide-angle snapshots of districts. We didn’t zoom in on at-risk groups of students so this myopic system hid the foundering achievement of minority groups, poor kids, and children with disabilities. But over the last decade, since the U.S. Congress passed NCLB in 2001, schools are held accountable not only for general achievement, but also for achievement gaps among differentiated cohorts. NCLB requires schools to publish data on test scores in math and language arts for eleven subgroups, highlighting low-performing groups. Data are us.

Read the rest here.