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Monday, July 9, 2007
AYP: A ‘Second Look’
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
State Superintendent of Schools Kathy Cox doesn’t think all campuses should face the same penalties when they fail to make “adequate yearly progress.”
According to the press release announcing this year’s AYP report, Cox wants to see differentiated consequences, which acknowledge that some schools fare worse than others on the yearly federal yardstick.
“It is my hope that Congress will embrace the idea … so that a school that missed AYP in just one area is not treated the same as a school that missed it across the board,” she said.
Of course, most public schools don’t fail across the board. More than half of the Georgia campuses that did not make the grade this year failed because of the performance of a single student group — say, special education pupils or English language learners.
Frankly, there are so many ways for a school to make AYP — so many outs, if you will, or as state officials like to call them “second looks” — that those being flagged really must be struggling in some area. So I can’t help wondering whether these “graduated consequences” would just lead to more muddying of the AYP waters.
Just for fun, let’s say there were individualized consequences. Which would be worse: a high school that couldn’t graduate 65 percent of its students or an elementary school that couldn’t get enough pupils to pass the state reading/language arts and math exams?
