AYP fails to meet goals
Report concludes school evaluation system is fundamentally flawed

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

CONTACT:  Teri Battaglieri (517) 203-2940 (e-mail) greatlakescenter@greatlakescenter.org

                      William J. Mathis (802) 247-5757 (e-mail) wmathis@sover.net

East Lansing, Mich., Sept. 25, 2006—Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP), the main indicator of academic achievement under No Child Left Behind, is an unproven, unrealistic and underfunded system for improving student performance in the nation’s public schools, according to a policy brief funded by the Great Lakes Center for Education Research and Practice.
 

AYP –and the accompanying penalties for failure –should be suspended and additional research into its effectiveness should be conducted before schools invest any more time or money or suffer anymore consequences for failure to achieve it, according to the policy brief titled The Accuracy and Effectiveness of Adequate yearly Progress, NCLB’s Evaluation System by Professor   William J. Mathis of the University of Vermont.
 

The AYP requirement is the driving force behind NCLB. It uses yearly gains in standardized test scores to measure school and student achievement. Failure by a school to meet yearly performance goals triggers sanctions and “corrective action” plans. The goal of AYP is that every child masters their state’s standardized tests by 2014.
 

According to Mathis, a University of Vermont researcher,  “AYP is not an effective instrument for measuring school performance and it is not sparking school reform as promised. Corrective action must be taken to prevent more harm to students and schools, and to develop a tool that will do the job.”

The policy brief reveals that:

• The meager improvements  in test scores are unlikely to be the result  of the AYP process and are too modest to achieve the goal of 100 percent mastery by 2014;
   
• Funding is inadequate to effectively implement the program, particularly for high poverty schools;
   
• The AYP process is driving schools to focus only on subjects that are tested at the expense of other important instruction;
   
• The nation’s poor and diverse schools are hit hardest by the negative effects of AYP.

Many of the brief’s conclusions mirror an earlier study released by the Great Lakes Center which found that nearly every school in the Great Lakes states will be labeled as “failing” by 2014 due to inadequate funding, lack of flexibility and other problems associated with the AYP requirement of NCLB.

The full policy brief is available at http://www.greatlakescenter.org.