A statewide accountability system mandated by the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 which requires each state to ensure that all schools and districts make Adequate Yearly Progress.
Adequate Yearly Progress, or AYP, is a measurement defined by the United States federal No Child Left Behind Act that allows the U.S. Department of Education to determine how every public school and school district in the country is performing academically according to results on standardized tests. AYP has been identified as one of the sources of controversy surrounding George W. Bush administration's Elementary and Secondary Education Act.[1] Private schools do not have to make AYP.
According to the Department of Education, AYP is a diagnostic tool that determines how schools need to improve and where financial resources should be allocated. Former U.S. Secretary of Education Rod Paige wrote, "The statute gives States and local educational agencies significant flexibility in how they direct resources and tailor interventions to the needs of individual schools identified for improvement... schools are held accountable for the achievement of all students, not just average student performance."
What is AYP?
- It encourages schools to raise the achievement of all students, not just the subset of students whose improvement will satisfy AYP goals.
- It focuses attention on individual classrooms. Under NCLB, schools - rather than teachers and administrators - are held directly accountable for student achievement, and there are no rewards for success, only sanctions for failure. If the focus is on struggling students rather than on the teachers who are providing ineffective instruction, scarce resources will be devoted to the symptoms rather than their underlying causes. When used at the classroom level, value-added assessment gives individual teachers and administrators specific data describing two key patterns - the focus and impact - of their instruction, allowing them to target interventions where they are needed.
- It is a better measure of school improvement. Under NCLB, school progress is an all-or-nothing affair - either the school makes AYP or it doesn't. However, value-added assessment shows any amount of progress that a school has made, even if it falls short of the AYP threshold. It does not sugarcoat low-achievement, but it does acknowledge the actual steps - both small and large - that schools make.
Requirements
All kindergarten through twelfth grade schools are required to demonstrate AYP in the areas of reading/language arts, mathematics, and either graduation rates, for high schools and districts, or attendance rates for elementary and middle/junior high schools. Currently, schools are allowed to appeal their AYP findings to their State Education Agency and/or the U.S. Department of Education, if applicable. Appeals have been made in account of standardized test results and data collected by testing companies such as Educational Testing Service. The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, Sec. 1111 (b)(F), requires that "each state shall establish a timeline for adequate yearly progress. The timeline shall ensure that not later than 12 years after the 2001-2002 school year, all students in each group described in subparagraph (C)(v) will meet or exceed the State's standards." These timelines are developed by state education agencies working under guidance from the federal government
Assessment
The NCLB Act requires states use standardized assessments in order to measure AYP. These assessments allow State Education Agencies to develop target starting goals for AYP. After those are developed, states must increase student achievement in gradual increments in order for 100 percent of the students to become proficient on state assessments by 2013-14 school year. Using assessment data from 2002, the U.S. Department of Education determined what specific percentages of students each state is required to make proficient in each subject area. Once those percentages were determined, each State Department of Education is required to ensure the standards are the same for each public school, each district, and each subgroup of students, irrespective of differences. Additionally, state education agencies must determine the yearly progress of districts, and identify districts in need of improvement.
If schools do not make AYP for three consecutive years, they must offer both alternative school attendance opportunities and opportunities for students to increase their learning outside of school time. If those schools miss AYP for a fourth consecutive year, they are designated as being in "Corrective Action" and must choose among strategies outlined by NCLB. A fifth year of missing AYP results in a restructuring planning year when the school is shut down, and then a sixth year of missing AYP requires that the restructuring plan be implemented. State Education Agencies across the United States have developed numerous strategies designed to improve AYP.
Controversy
Schools across the country are being forced to restructure according to standards dictated by the federal government, rather than local needs. A principal of one such school remarked, "Putting all of the neediest special education students in a few schools seems to create insoluble challenges under No Child Left Behind." Those determinations often come down to the performance of small numbers of students that do not reflect the progress of the whole school.
Criticisms are being met with a series of innovations on the state level. In 2007, the top official of the Ohio Department of Education diagnosed that NCLB "paid no attention to whether students below proficient were making strides, or (those) above proficiency." That state is proposing a more subtle "growth model" that would allow schools to better demonstrate progress without jeopardizing past academic accomplishments.
Universal Design for Learning Impacts Adequate Yearly Progress
Since 2002, the Center for Leadership in Education has been engaging school districts in the principles, the strategies and the methods by which Universal Design for Learning, a classroom management tool, can help all children learn to the best of their abilities. (Click Here)
Many current-day discussions of adapting curricula are centered on the difficulty of addressing a diversity of student abilities within a single classroom, and often, assessing this multiplicity with a single test to determine adequate yearly progress, or AYP. Applying theoretical frameworks such as Universal Design for Learning to the instructional cycle of planning, teaching and assessment could reverse some of these dilemmas for many teachers in today's schools. How this can impact AYP in classrooms today is a new initiative of the Center for Leadership in Education. Teachers and administrators will learn how to make it happen and why it makes sense for today's teachers to learn to teach to a great diversity of skill levels and abilities, even within a single content-area classroom.
For more information, please contact Jeff Jaroscak at the Center for Leadership in Education.
References
- "No Educator Left Behind: Private Schools". Education World. Retrieved 7/5/07.
- Paige, R. (2002) "Key Policy Letters Signed by the Education Secretary or Deputy Secretary," U.S. Department of Education. 7/25/02. Retrieved 6/31/07.
- Seeton, M.G. (2007) "State model may change assessment of student progress". CantonRep.com. 6/24/07. Retrieved 6/29/07.
- Rose, David H. & Meyer, Anne, Editors (2006). A Practical Reader in Universal Design for Learning. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Education Publishing.
External links
- Resources on AYP. Education Commission of the States.
- The ABCs of AYP. Explanation of the NCLB accountability system from The Education Trust.