Under NCLB three levels of achievement, basic, proficient and advanced, must be specified for each grade level in each content area by each state. States were required to set a time table from 2002 that insured an increasing percentage of students would reach the proficient levels such that by 2013-14, so every child is performing at or the proficient level. Schools and school districts who meet this timetable are said to meet adequate yearly progress (AYP).
Because every child must reach proficiency by 2013-14 greater increases are required for those schools that had larger percentages of initially lower performing students.
Figure 12.1 illustrates the progress needed in three hypothetical schools. School A, initially the lowest performing school, has to increase the number of students reaching proficiency by an average of 6 per cent each year, the increase is 3 per cent for School B, and the increase is only 1 per cent for School C. Also, the checkpoint targets in the timetables are determined by the lower performing schools. This is illustrated on the figure by the arrow it is obvious that School A has to make significant improvements by 2007-8 but School C does not have to improve at all by 2007-8. This means that schools that are initially lower performing are much more likely to fail to make AYP during the initial implementation years of NCLB.
Schools A, B and C all must reach 10 per cent student proficiency by 2013-4. However the school that initially has the lowest level of performance (A) has to increase the percentage of students proficient at a greater rate than schools with middle (B) or high (C) levels of initial proficiency rates.
- 1527 reads
