State's change to AYP enforcement makes good sense

 

The progress the Ohio Department of Education recently made in its revision of the state's system for dealing with schools struggling to improve their state report cards is more than adequate.

Last week, the department announced a change to the way it deals with schools that fail to meet Adequate Yearly Progress, that facet of the federal No Child Left Behind Act that determines whether students have made great enough gains in their knowledge.

The state has in place a provision that mandates curricular alterations at schools that fail to meet AYP for several consecutive years. Miss it three years in a row, and your school has to offer transfers to other district schools for parents who want to get their kids out; miss it for five, and you're hiring (or rehiring) a whole new staff and redesigning your school from the bottom up. That has already happened at a number of Columbus schools.

As it turns out, it's deceptively easy for an otherwise high-performing school or district to miss AYP; for the 2006-07 school year, only four of the school districts covered by Suburban News Publications met the standard: Bexley, Delaware, Grandview Heights and Columbus. Among the names of the districts that missed out are several known for their high test scores and overall performance: Dublin, New Albany, Upper Arlington and Olentangy, to name a few.

The reason? Subgroups. Even if a huge majority of a school's students are moving along at a respectable pace, a single subgroup of students -- those with learning disabilities, maybe, or those for whom English is not their first language -- may not clear the bar, and if it doesn't, the entire school fails to meet AYP.

But now, if a school is only failing to meet AYP because of one or two subgroups, it no longer faces drastic changes; it can instead adopt changes that focus specifically on the struggling subgroups. For instance, a school whose difficulties stem from trouble getting members of a certain subgroup to attend school might work out a system to observe another, more successful school with similar demographics.

"We have been developing (a) tool to allow districts to input their specific information and be provided with some possible problems and, by extension, possible solutions," said ODE spokesman Scott Blake.

The standards for meeting AYP have not changed. Fail to adequately serve one subgroup of students, and your school is still not going to meet AYP. But where the problems remain the same, the solutions may be different. The idea: If the staff and curriculum are working for 95 percent of the students, it makes more sense to change the way the other 5 percent are educated than to change the way 100 percent are educated.

The New Albany school district received a rating of "excellent" on its report card last year, meeting 29 out of 30 indicators. Nevertheless, it failed to meet AYP because a subgroup of special education students "made progress but did not make the level of progress to meet the AYP goal," said district Director of Teaching and Learning Madeline Partlow.

It's too early to say how the state's changes will affect a district like New Albany, Partlow said, but she did say the district already focuses hard on subgroups that are slow to improve. It's not too much of a stretch, I think, to say the freedom to focus in on that struggling subgroup, rather than restructure the entire school around it, will be a more constructive solution to the school's problem.

Struggling students -- even if there are only a handful of them -- still need to receive the attention they need to succeed. But there's no sense in effectively punishing a school by mandating overhauls when a large overhaul isn't necessary.

The state deserves credit for making some needed fixes to a part of the system that didn't make sense. And that it managed to get the federal government's OK to move forward with its plan is all the more impressive.