Let’s At Least Answer That Question Definitively Before Proceeding
By Charles Barone, DFER Director of Federal Policy
In a post last Friday, I mentioned that I have doubts about the so-called “train wreck” that is supposed to occur in or before the year 2014 when, as a perceived result of the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), virtually every school in the U.S. will be labeled a “failure” because 100% of its students are not proficient in math and reading.
The NCLB law seems, to me at least, to leave a gaping loophole that the chicken littles have overlooked or, for whatever reason, chosen to ignore. Remember way back, a month ago, when everyone was talking about the “internet filter bubble”? I think there may be one surrounding the debate over ESEA, NCLB, and Adequate Yearly Progess. See what you think.
The provision in Title I of NCLB that has everyone panicking is this one:
”(F) TIMELINE.–Each State shall establish a timeline for adequate yearly progress. The timeline shall ensure that not later than 12 years after the end of the 2001-2002 school year, all students in each group described in subparagraph (C)(v) will meet or exceed the State’s proficient level of academic achievement on the State assessments under paragraph (3).”
Paragraph (G) describes how the annual markers shall be set for the “100% by 2014” goal.
Sounds clearly like 100% by 2014, right?
Except that NCLB goes on in the next section to give schools an alternative to the “100% by 2014” timeline for determining AYP. Particularly noteworthy is the use of the words “Each year,” “except that,” and “in any particular year”:
“(I) ANNUAL IMPROVEMENT FOR SCHOOLS – Each year, for a school to make adequate yearly progress under this paragraph–(I) each group of students described in subparagraph (C)(v) must meet or exceed the objectives set by the State under subparagraph (G), except that if any group described in subparagraph (C)(v) does not meet those objectives in any particular year, the school shall be considered to have made adequate yearly progress if the percentage of students in that group who did not meet or exceed the proficient level of academic achievement on the State assessments under paragraph (3) for that year decreased by 10 percent of that percentage from the preceding school year and that group made progress on one or more of the academic indicators described in subparagraph (C)(vi) or (vii);”
The way I read this, schools can make AYP at least one of two ways and can do so “in any particular year,” i.e., 2013, 2014, or 2020 for that matter, if the law continues to go unchanged.