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Chuck France/AP Photo

U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings fields a question during a news conference Wednesday in Topeka. Spellings was the guest of Kansas Education Commissioner Alexa Posny and headed a roundtable discussion on educational policies with various business, education and civic leaders in the state.

Topeka — The federal No Child Left Behind Act has helped make strides in American public education since 2001, but how the government administers it might need some tweaking, U.S. Education Secretary Margaret Spellings said Wednesday during a visit to Kansas.

“The conversation is much more sophisticated than it was five to six years ago,” Spellings said at the Kansas State Department of Education.

She mentioned moving toward testing individual students over several years — known as the growth model — instead of testing the same grade levels each year. Spellings also touted ideas such as improving high schools by adding career and technical education and helping districts recruit and retain high-quality teachers.

Wednesday marked Spellings’ 10th visit to a state to meet with leaders to discuss improving No Child Left Behind. Spellings and Kansas Education Commissioner Alexa Posny conducted a roundtable with legislators, superintendents, business leaders and state board members Carol Rupe and Janet Waugh.

Nearly 60 Kansas school boards, including Lawrence, have adopted resolutions calling on Congress to pass legislation to improve the controversial law, which requires all students to be proficient in reading and math by 2014. Congress has not reauthorized the law, and the current provisions remain in effect until new legislation takes their place.

Spellings did say several times the law has allowed states to focus on finding students who need the most help improving their proficiency.

One Kansas teacher said that was honorable.

“That’s exciting to me because we didn’t have the data. We did not talk like that nine to 10 years ago,” said Kansas Teacher of the Year Jeri Powers, a De Soto elementary school reading specialist.

These are highlights of issues Spellings and state leaders discussed:

• Growth-model testing. Spellings touted granting a waiver to nine states to institute a growth-model system and recently allowed every state to apply for one.

She said Congress passed the law in 2001 requiring states to use assessment tests because very few states had annual tests that allowed the government to make meaningful comparisons.

• School safety. Spellings acknowledged that one of the least successful provisions of the law is the one that designates schools as persistently dangerous. Schools can be put on the list based on crime data, but states and law enforcement officials have been reluctant to do so. No Kansas school has the label.

“There has to be a lot of connectedness and communication between law enforcement officials and educators, which is frankly just sort of beginning,” she said.

School safety has been a hot topic for years, especially after shootings last April at Virginia Tech and last week at Northern Illinois University.

• High school improvement. Most of the success with the current law has come at the third- through eighth-grade levels, Spellings said.

Now she wants to figure out how to help high schools improve. Improving courses such as Advanced Placement and beefing up job training offerings should be a high priority, she said.

• Teacher shortages. With school districts nationwide facing a significant number of teacher retirements, Spellings said she is encouraged by Teach for America’s success at recruiting on college campuses.

She cited the need to improve the bureaucracy at the state level for qualification and certification. Teacher pay is also an issue.

But the demand from young people who want to teach is there, even though challenges remain, she said.

“It’s our job to figure out how we’re going to tap into that,” Spellings said.

• Funding. After she lauded the state’s improvements in assessments, especially among special education and low-income students, Spellings announced Kansas has qualified for a $950,000 school improvement grant to help about 30 Title 1 schools on the “needs improvement” list. None of those schools is in Douglas County.