Adequate Yearly Progress. It sounds like a noble goal, a means of ensuring that every school in the U.S. is meeting academic standards in order for each child to get a good education.
In reality, AYP is a moving target, making it nearly impossible for even excellent public schools like Downers Grove North and South high schools to clear a hurdle that gets higher with every passing year.
The D99 school board heard a lengthy presentation Sept. 14 about the steps currently being taken to bring lagging student subgroups up to standards. By all appearances it is a valiant, creative and all-out effort. And yet it falls short.
As the key measurement imposed by the No Child Left Behind Act of 2000, AYP dictates that standards will rise each year until 2014 when 100 percent of juniors taking the Prairie State Achieve Exam and ACT will be required to meet them. Even the kid who shows up sick, who stayed out all night partying or who just learned his parents are filing for divorce.
Add to this challenge another moving target — the 25 percent of each school’s student population that turns over each year. Every fall brings a new class of freshmen, with their own particular challenges and needs, that D99 has less than three academic years to address before the tests are administered April of junior year.
“Growth across the board is not linear,” said Supt. Mark McDonald. “A year ago, we had a huge jump in number of kids who met state standards in math. We didn’t have a huge jump this year, but we had a gain. We’re not going to make a jump every year.”
Yet despite the gains, the district continues to be cited. “It’s very disappointing,” he said.
“Everybody understands that our obligation professionally, legally and ethically is to educate all our kids. That’s our role and we get it,” he said. “But the way the formula plays out for us is confounding.
“It’s going to come to the point in three or four years where only a small magnet high school that only accepts gifted kids is going to make AYP and all the others will fall short of it,” McDonald said.
It’s impossible to discuss the district’s AYP without noting the vast difference between achievement overall and that of various student subgroups.
While the law defines a subgroup as having 45 members, the district’s African-American and Hispanic subgroups each include less than 100 students. As a result, each student’s score has a greater-than-one-percent impact on the group’s total performance.
Other subgroups — low income students, students in special education — are two to three times larger and also include students from other white, Asian, Hispanic, African-American and low-income subgroups.
The performance of these groups is where the district’s AYP effort is being applied through a variety of programs aimed at raising performance.
Among those presented to the D99 board last Monday:
* North High’s increasing number of co-taught courses, which put a second teacher in various classrooms in an effort to better meet the needs of students with special needs.
* A North High Literacy Liaison Program which trains teacher volunteers to incorporate reading strategies to improve comprehension in courses from math to biology to foreign language.
* A double-block algebra initiative at South High that allows failing first-semester students to double up on algebra in the second semester in order to complete a three or four year college-bound math sequence.
* South High’s STRIVE program, where students learn study habits and skills and improve their academic performance in 12 or 24 sessions.
* Special education programs held in the Learning Resource Centers of both high schools that help students make better use of their daily resource period to allow for homework completion, academic support and organizational help.
The programs, which all have achieved the goal of raising student performance, require a reallocation of district resources, according to the spirit of NCLB.
“We have done this more in recent years, albeit we have worked hard to keep the student-to-teacher ratio — which ultimately affects class sizes — consistent,” McDonald said.
However, not every program comes with a cost. The Literacy Liaison program, for example, allows teachers to participate during their planning time or before or after school, McDonald said. “They do so because they are motivated to be better at their craft and serve their students more effectively.”
Another challenge facing D99 and other Illinois schools is the state mandate that all juniors must take the ACT, even those who do not plan on applying to college. As a result, the testing population outside Illinois and the other two states that also mandate the ACT (California and Michigan) “is much more homogeneous than in Illinois and arguably should perform better than a student population containing all students,” McDonald said.
Despite those odds, D99 students score far above the national and state average on the ACT. But it still isn’t enough to meet AYP benchmarks across the board.
For district administrators, teachers and parents, the frustration is understandable. Like many parents, I’ve been impressed by the caliber of teachers, the breadth of course offerings and the overall high quality of my child’s D99 education.
The opportunities have been vast compared to my own high school experience and it’s difficult to comprehend the district may someday face penalties for its failures in the face of so much success.
While there is no doubt every child deserves a good education — and that school districts have a responsibility to find creative and effective ways to provide it — there is no assurance that every child will be able to embrace the opportunity. Even, apparently, in a suburban district like ours.
Therein lies the dilemma for D99. How do you ensure a standard level of achievement among an entire student population?
“We’d like to see personal responsibility in all our kids,” McDonald said. “We have the obligation as professionals to reach out to all our kids and get them to be better than they think they are.”
If the horse won’t drink, what can you do? AYP is a noble idea that ignores the reality of life. I would like to see some studies that measure the correlation of academic performance to parental involvement and dual vs. single parent families. As this article implies, for whatever reasons some kids just won’t take advantage of the tremendous opportunities provided to them.
I agree DG_DA, you can only do so much. If there is no or little parental support the chance of success is far less. Certain demographics in our society place emphasis on the wrong things. I will say what everyone wants to say…The resolution to this problem lies with in the cultures of certain demographics. Improve the attitude towards school at the cultural level and you will start to see more success. But don’t count on Obama helping there. He wants minorities to not take advantage of the education that is provided to them. This way they will be on the welfare rolls and vote Democratic every time. Sad really.