Daria Hall, Ross Wiener, and Kevin Carey, Education Trust
2003
This short report is the second from the Education Trust that seeks to explain the Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) provisions of the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB). The first, The ABCs of AYP, explained what the provision meant and how they were meant to work. [For more on the first report, go to http://www.edexcellence.net/gadfly/issue.cfm?issue=24#109] This new one illustrates the effects that AYP is having on schools. According to the new report, AYP is successfully identifying schools as "in need of improvement" that had previously been considered highly successful. A case in point: one successful school boasted that 60 percent of its students were at or above proficient in reading/language arts. When broken down by subgroups, however, it turned out that 96 percent of white students were proficient, but only 39 percent of Latino students and 53 percent of African American students were. According to the authors, such results show that NCLB is already "having positive effects by focusing attention on the goal of holding all schools within a state to the same standards of student achievement and bringing urgent attention to achievement gaps between different groups of students Of course, the authors recognize that the success or failure of this NCLB provision depends on whether or not schools, administrators, and policymakers can look past the short-term angst of labeling schools "failing" or "needing improvement" and stay the course over the next 12 years. You can find it at http://www2.edtrust.org/NR/rdonlyres/4B9BF8DE-987A-4063-B750-6D67607E7205/0/NewAYP.pdf.
