On Aug. 2, the Alabama Department of Education reported which public schools and school systems made and didn’t make adequate yearly progress (AYP) for 2010. Measuring AYP is required by federal law, and consistent failure brings penalties for schools with large amounts of federal funding.
However, AYP calculations are complicated and sometimes they mask rather than expose performance differences. This may be an inevitable result of defining student performance goals at the national and state levels instead of providing transparent results that local communities can use to engage in improvement efforts. Making the correct list becomes more important than improving the performance that was originally to be measured.
AYP goals are defined in terms of the percent of students who exceed a certain score on statewide reading and math tests. Federal law requires the percent of students who exceed that score to rise each year; the unlikely goal is for 100 percent of students to exceed the target score by 2014. Like a number of other states, Alabama has set its target score low, and optional calculations are available for schools and systems that don’t meet them.
AYP goals apply to all students in a school or system and any defined subgroup with 40 or more members. All subgroups have to make the goal. Subgroup definitions are based on poverty, race and ethnicity, language proficiency and special education status. Oddly students above the poverty level are not in a subgroup, although they comprise almost half of all students statewide.
Thus one school may be on the Made AYP list without meeting real AYP goals in any subgroup through the optional calculations, while a higher-performing school may be on the Did Not Make AYP list because one small subgroup did not succeed.
Parents, school officials and others interested in improving Alabama’s schools may find that simple, direct presentations of student results are more helpful than the AYP data in recognizing success and targeting improvement efforts. Read more about this at http://parca.samford.edu.
EDITOR’S NOTE — Jim Williams is executive director for the nonprofit, nonpartisan Public Affairs Research Council of Alabama. Jim may be contacted at jwwillia@samford.edu.
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