The second approach focuses on growth where the schools’ initial level of achievement is the starting point, and the students are expected to achieve a certain amount of growth for a school to be effective. These methods are called “value-added” approaches. For example, an accountability system may expect a growth of four points in third-grade reading for students who had a high level of initial achievement and six points for students who had a low level of initial achievement. A readable description of various value-added assessment methods is available at: http://www.effwa.org/pdfs/Value-Added.pdf (PDF). Mississippi is an example of a state that is planning to implement a growth model for state accountability: http://www.mde.k12.ms.us/Extrel/pub/MAS.pdf (PDF).
Clearly, these two types of accountability systems can lead to different conclusions about a school. A school may have a relatively low percentage of students passing a test but also have succeeded in having its students learn more than is expected for a year of schooling.
The No Child Left Behind (NCLB) legislation has resulted in a federal accountability system for all schools in the nation. One major addition of the NCLB Act is the reporting of test results by subgroup (if there are large enough numbers of students in a particular subgroup). Results can be reported by such subgroups as ethnicity, gender, parental income level, special education, and limited English proficiency. The ultimate goal of NCLB is for each student to be on grade level by the year 2014.
Thus, each year, a school has a target to meet for each subgroup. This target is called “Adequate Yearly Progress” (AYP), and it is the percentage of students in each subgroup that need to be on grade level for that school. Each state sets its own targets for each year to get to 100% by 2014, and, as a result, there is no standard definition of AYP. You will have to check with your state to find out its AYP plan. The School Information Partnership has a comprehensive website that provides each state’s AYP goals and results.
Keep in mind that a school can have different NCLB accountability results than state accountability results. For example, in the 2003/04 school year, 50% of the schools in Florida that were classified as A schools did not meet all the targets for all subgroups and were considered in need of improvement under NCLB. You will need to find out what target(s) your local schools met or did not meet to accurately interpret the AYP results.
Because it is difficult for a school to meet AYP targets for all subgroups, it is important not to jump to conclusions about local school performance without investing time to understand all accountability results. The Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) has a detailed paper on the difficulties in comparing results between states (“Cautions when comparing states” ).
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