How to gauge a school's progress

As Congress prepares to reauthorize No Child Left Behind, more educators want new definitions of achievement.

from the April 26, 2007 edition

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Counting student progress has precedent in a few states, such as North Carolina. Since 1997, schools there have been measured by a combination of proficiency and improvement.

NCLB "made a complicated system even more complicated," says Lou Fabrizio, director of accountability services with the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction. "Schools would be designated as meeting a growth component under our program, but they would potentially be listed as not making AYP, and that [causes] a little bit of confusion," he says.

But recently he's been glad to add yet another layer of complexity. North Carolina is one of five states that the US Department of Education is allowing to experiment with growth models in AYP calculations.

After one year, "it did not help as much as we would have hoped," Mr. Fabrizio says, but it's too soon to judge how many more schools might be able to show progress under such a system. (Last year, 45 percent of the state's schools met AYP.)

The US House Committee on Education and Labor held a hearing last month on growth models and other assessment issues. A committee staff member says the research in support of growth models is almost overwhelming, and it's no longer a matter of whether to use them, but of how. The committee aims to prepare a reauthorization bill by this summer, though a full vote by Congress on such bills could be delayed until after the 2008 elections.

One point of contention is whether all students should be expected to reach proficiency by 2014. Some critics say that goal is artificial.

"We need to start in reality instead of a fantasy," says Monty Neill, executive director of FairTest in Cambridge, Mass., one of more than 100 groups that have signed a Joint Organizational Statement on NCLB. Schools serving high-needs populations should be expected to aim for a growth rate based on what's already being achieved by schools doing well with similar populations, he says.

But US Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings calls the 2014 goal one of her "bright line principles."

The DOE put out a proposal earlier this year that noted, "a growth model is a tool to achieve proficiency by 2014, not a loophole to avoid it."

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