Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP)

Chelsea Potts
12/09/2009

Adequate Yearly Progress

Adequate yearly progress (AYP) is a series of annual academic performance goals specified for each school, and the state as a whole. If the goals are met and/or exceeded, the school is considered to have met AYP for that year. AYP is required under the Title I Act of No Child Left Behind(NCLB), which is the program that helps to educate low income children. The primary goal is for all students to be proficient in language and math by 2014, according to state assessments. Those schools that do not meet these criteria two years running are considered high priority, and overall, are not achieving academic progress.
One of the obvious benefits of AYP is that it is holding schools accountable to provide the best possible education for students. Educational expectations, in the form of standards, are established as objectives and schools are meant to meet them to be considered academically successful. AYP provides a mechanism for identifying and helping schools that need help, based upon these fixed criteria. As a school’s primary objective is the success of its students, AYP is a way to make sure schools are on the ball working toward this goal. As AYP has been put in place to help lower achieving schools, it is serving to decrease the achievement gap. Many minorities are in schools that are potentially considered high priority. Having a system in place to identify and remedy these schools and increase the students’ success is serving to level the playing field, so to speak. Also, parents are informed of AYP and their school’s success rate. This gives parents and the community at large a better understanding of how their school rates nationally, and could involve them in potential reforms.
AYP, and the NCLB Act overall, have considerably more critics than supporters. First of all, AYP simply identifies the schools that need help. If these schools do not make AYP two years consecutively, they start a process that can take up to 7 years, depending on if they keep missing AYP, to put into place a plan for restructuring. It can be an incredibly slow process. These standards and assessments, developed to measure AYP, are the single accountability system for a school to track performance. We are always taught that you should not base your diagnosis on one form of assessments, and a wide variety is needed to get the entire picture. AYP is based upon the one assessment, and either a school makes it or does not. AYP is measuring a school or district’s proficiency. They developed one type of assessment, and it is distributed to all learners, regardless of their background. All subgroups are assessed the same way, which is unfair, considering some are clearly more disadvantaged than others. Additionally, if schools do not make AYP two consecutive years, regardless if there have been improvements made, they have to face the sanctions. Schools are also feeling pressured; the deadline for proficiency assessed by AYP is 2014, which is right around the corner. It is not realistic to expect that every school, and every subgroup within each school, will make AYP while utilizing the assessments we are currently using. The idea behind AYP is a good one; it is serving to make schools responsible for giving each student the education that they deserve, and if they can’t, providing the tools for them to do so. However, AYP is a signaling system; it is bringing to light the schools that require improvement and the existing achievement gaps. The data provided by AYP is what improvements are based on, and until these assessments are made fair, the real improvement is still out of reach.
References
“The ABCs of AYP: Raising Achievement for All Students”, Education Trust, Spring
2003.
“Stronger Accountability: Adequate Yearly Progress”, U.S. Department of Education,
http://www.ed.gov/nclb/accountability/ayp/edpicks.jhtml.