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While the standards to meet No Child Left Behind’s Academic Yearly Progress differ between grade school districts and high school districts, the results appear to be very similar — every school district in Washington is “failing” according to AYP.
Testing methods differ between the high school and grade schools however; every students’ score in the third-eighth grade on the Illinois Standards Achievements Test is included. At the high school level only juniors are tested on the Academic Core Testing and the Prairie State Achievement Exams.
Scores are then tabulated and compiled with the end result being a percentage of students who either meet or exceed AYP standards and a percentage of students who do not.
While District 308 only had to worry about its juniors’ scores, the grade school districts had to meet at the not just the district level, but each individual grade school had to meet AYP standards as well.
Crunching numbers
The percentage of students who have met or exceeded AYP standards for both District 51 and 52 has been consistently in the 90th percentile since AYP’s implementation in 2002.
The percentage of students having to meet AYP standards has increased almost 7.5 percent every year since 2003, with the eventual goal being 100 percent by 2014.
While all four schools involved — Central Grade, Central Intermediate, Washington Middle and Lincoln Grade — met the 2011 standard of 85 percent of students either meeting or exceeding standards, neither district met the 85 percent requirement because both districts had one subgroup fail to hit the requirement.
Not only do the schools and districts have to meet AYP, but different subgroups — based on race, family income and students with disabilities — have to meet as well.
Subgroups with fewer than 45 students are not reported, so individual schools may not have enough students to qualify, while a district of two schools can and does in the case of Lincoln Grade School and Washington Middle School for District 52 and Central Primary and Central Intermediate for District 51.
If just one subgroup fails to meet then the whole district is considered a “failing” district.
• District 51
Despite 91.4 percent of the 664 third-eighth-grade students meeting or exceeding in reading and 95.2 percent in mathematics, District 51 is considered a failing district because only 62.1 percent of its students who have disabilities met or exceeded AYP standards in reading.
“It was a subgroup of students who are going to have a tough time on a standardized test anyway,” said District 51 Superintendent Dr. Chad Allaman. “Many districts are in that boat where in the district overall, students are performing very well.
While the standards to meet No Child Left Behind’s Academic Yearly Progress differ between grade school districts and high school districts, the results appear to be very similar — every school district in Washington is “failing” according to AYP.
Testing methods differ between the high school and grade schools however; every students’ score in the third-eighth grade on the Illinois Standards Achievements Test is included. At the high school level only juniors are tested on the Academic Core Testing and the Prairie State Achievement Exams.
Scores are then tabulated and compiled with the end result being a percentage of students who either meet or exceed AYP standards and a percentage of students who do not.
While District 308 only had to worry about its juniors’ scores, the grade school districts had to meet at the not just the district level, but each individual grade school had to meet AYP standards as well.
Crunching numbers
The percentage of students who have met or exceeded AYP standards for both District 51 and 52 has been consistently in the 90th percentile since AYP’s implementation in 2002.
The percentage of students having to meet AYP standards has increased almost 7.5 percent every year since 2003, with the eventual goal being 100 percent by 2014.
While all four schools involved — Central Grade, Central Intermediate, Washington Middle and Lincoln Grade — met the 2011 standard of 85 percent of students either meeting or exceeding standards, neither district met the 85 percent requirement because both districts had one subgroup fail to hit the requirement.
Not only do the schools and districts have to meet AYP, but different subgroups — based on race, family income and students with disabilities — have to meet as well.
Subgroups with fewer than 45 students are not reported, so individual schools may not have enough students to qualify, while a district of two schools can and does in the case of Lincoln Grade School and Washington Middle School for District 52 and Central Primary and Central Intermediate for District 51.
If just one subgroup fails to meet then the whole district is considered a “failing” district.
• District 51
Despite 91.4 percent of the 664 third-eighth-grade students meeting or exceeding in reading and 95.2 percent in mathematics, District 51 is considered a failing district because only 62.1 percent of its students who have disabilities met or exceeded AYP standards in reading.
“It was a subgroup of students who are going to have a tough time on a standardized test anyway,” said District 51 Superintendent Dr. Chad Allaman. “Many districts are in that boat where in the district overall, students are performing very well.
“We are an award-winning district and one of the top districts in the state ... however the district has this stigma attached to it that it didn’t meet AYP.”
The composite percentage of students for District 51 who met or exceeded AYP standards on the ISAT test has increased 14 percentage points since a low of 79 in 2003; for the past four years 93 percent of its students in both reading and math have met or exceeded standards.
Allaman, who has been superintendent of District 51 since 2007, said administrators and teachers in the district pride themselves on having high AYP scores, but they understand the focus should be more on student learning instead of one test.
“We have always stressed with teachers that we never want to rely on a single test taken on a single day as the single measure for how our schools are performing...” he said. “... Their primary job is to focus on student learning; we are way more concerned with students learning the material than how they perform on a test on a single day.”
• District 52
Despite 91.5 percent of the 556 third-eighth-grade students meeting or exceeding in reading and 92.8 percent in mathematics, District 51 is considered a failing district because only 65.8 percent of its students who have disabilities met or exceeded AYP standards in reading.
District 52 is in the same boat as District 51 in terms of both schools meeting AYP, but as districts, they don’t because of one subgroup.
“The (subgroup) we are deficient in is our special education students, who are students with some form of learning disability, but they have to take the same exact test as all of our other students,” said District 52 Superintendent Dr. John Tignor. “Throughout the year if they have to (eventually) be tested at the fifth-grade level and you’re trying to get them there, but they’re only working at a third-grade level you can’t just have them take the fifth-grade test ... that doesn’t make sense.
“You have to find out where they are at and throw the ball in the strike zone (for them) so you continue to have progress.”
Now in his fourth year as District 52 Superintendent, Tignor said in order to get those testing numbers of those in the “students with disabilities” subgroups up to AYP standards, it is important to really work with the individual needs of every student because not every one of them has the same deficiency.
“We continue to target that population and so we know who they are ... one tough thing about ISAT is they give you some information on how a kid scores, but not the detailed information that becomes the formative information — where the kids’ deficiencies are and help them along the way,” he said.
The composite percentage of students who met or exceeded AYP standards on the ISAT test has never been below 86 percent and has increased from 89 in 2007 to 92 in 2011.
“One of the things we’re doing is making sure we’re providing the resources for teachers to be able to continue (with the high test scores),” Tignor said.
“We really have a strong teaching staff here. Our teachers are good at what they do. The parents and students and teachers are the reason we have such good scores. ... We know that at home parents are working with their children and are interested in education.
“Teachers see that on a daily basis, which translates into kids being successful in school.”
• District 50
Of the 499 students tested in District 50, 75.1 percent met or exceeded in reading which fell 9.9 percentage points short of meeting AYP. In both the “students with disabilities” and “economically disadvantaged” subgroups, District 50 also failed to meet AYP with 43.8 percent and 68.9 percent respectively.
In mathematics, however, District 50 met AYP standards with 85.4 percent including 57.5 percent of the “students with disabilities” subgroup.
Compositely, the district as a whole over the years has been right around the 80 percent of meeting or exceeding mark with a low of 65 in 2003 and a high of 83 in 2008; last year was 81 percent.
“This is when you start to get into the area of diminishing returns,” District 50 Superintendent Patrick Martin said. “The higher that you get, the more difficult it is to improve upon your scores.”
The state’s average composite percentage of students who meet or exceed AYP has increased from 61 in 2003 to 77 in 2011; just like the other Washington districts, District 50 has stayed ahead of the state’s average composite score since AYP’s testing began in 2002.
Martin is in his second year as superintendent of District 50 schools.
“There are some very good things that came out of No Child Left Behind ... deeming schools failures based on a two- to five-day assessment could be rethought out when it comes to reauthorization, but the one thing that I think is memorable ... was this evaluation and gauging of data,” Martin said.
“This data is so rich and that’s what is so important to improving ... teachers not only using the assessments they’ve created — tests, worksheets, verbal ... now they’re able to look at all of this data not just from ISATs, but we have (Response to Intervention and other new assessment systems).”
— See next week’s edition of the Times-Reporter for the final article in the series looking at Washington district’s AYP scores. Next week’s article will detail how the schools are changing the way they have traditionally done things, while still striving to be better in every aspect of education through Response to Intervention and other assessment systems.
