Michael Winerip’s piece in the Times today highlights why NCLB is a truly flawed law.

IN the right kind of world, Public School 48 in the South Bronx would be getting all kinds of awards. Though the school serves some of the city’s poorest minority children (75 per cent Hispanic, 25 per cent black and all eligible for free lunches), P.S. 48’s test scores have soared in the last few years. In 2005, 86 per cent of fourth graders scored proficient in math, and 68.5 per cent in English, placing P.S. 48 near the top of the Bronx’s 130 elementary schools.

The principal, John Hughes, has mixed feelings about all the testing that goes on these days, but professionally, he has put that all aside. "The profit margin in this business is test scores," he said. "That’s all they measure you by now."

Test prep? "Are you kidding?" he said. "We start in September and we don’t stop until the tests are over," in March.

"I can’t afford not to do test prep," he said. "Otherwise my kids don’t have a chance. It’s all by the test numbers. If they score 3’s or 4’s, they have marketability for getting into one of the city’s good middle schools." With low scores of 2 or 1, out of a maximum of 4, they are stuck in a bad neighborhood school.

In 2004, Chancellor Joel I. Klein attended graduation, praising the test scores and wearing a T-shirt with the P.S. 48 slogan, "Best School in the Universe."

But the universe P.S. 48 gets evaluated in has little to do with the real world. P.S. 48 is measured in the federal No Child Left Behind world, and in that universe, it has been labeled failing.

Read the whole article to see why P.S. 48 was labelled failing — it was because of erroneous student data. But the article highlights why NCLB is such a problem. We can’t judge schools by a single score on a test. Real data-driven decision making is much more costly and time-consuming than what we as a society are currently willing to do. Joel Klein went to P.S. 48 — he knew the school was working. He knew those kids were learning.

Why do we continue to think that a test score can tell us anywhere near a complete story of a student or a school?