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David Jenner
English 3001
Coleman
Writers Profile 3
The Best Way to Meet Annual Yearly Progress
No Child Left Behind was passed in 2001, and it was the single biggest piece of
education legislation passed in the last decade. It is considered to be “one of the most
ambitious pieces of legislation” ever passed through Congress (Vannest 10). It reworked
the standards that every student and teacher will be held to each year, and every school
will be mapped using Annual Yearly Progress, or AYP. According to the legislation, the
goal of AYP is to get every school in the United States to 100% proficiency in reading,
math, and science by the 2013-14 school year. While this is a good goal, it may not be
reachable for every school in the United States. It is up to the teachers teaching in the
school and the administrators to find ways for the school to make the progress each year.
For schools to reach this goal, they have been adopting many new things to assist them in
doing so such as mapping out trajectories for making progress each year, putting
struggling groups into subgroups, and new forms of teaching strategies that will be used
to educate children. Many people in education argue that No Child Left Behind and AYP
are working, but there are others that are certain that it is only a matter of time before
every school is considered failing. The main focus should not be that if a school is failing,
but they should focus on making sure that every child in their school makes the most
progress possible each year.
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The goal of No Child Left Behind, according to the legislation, is for every child
to be 100% proficient in reading, math, and science by the 2013-14 school year. Each
school is required to map out exactly how they are going to reach this goal throughout the
years since the legislation was passed. Every state was given the option to choose as to
how they would accomplish this goal and this would be their accountability plan. There
are three major types of ways that each state has chosen are “backload, incremental, and
blended trajectories” (Smyth 3). The first most used way by many states is the “back-
loaded trajectory”. This type of path’s goal is to make minimal gains in the beginning
years and make higher gains as the years get closer to 2014. Twenty-three states
throughout the United States have decided to use this kind of path (Smyth 4). One of the
main reasons that they have decided to use this kind of path is because they wanted a few
years of cushion so that they could implement new testing styles and make sure that they
work. Another type of path that states are using to reach their goal is an incremental
trajectory. This type of path is based on a steady increase over the years to make the goal
of 100% proficiency by 2014 (Smyth). This kind of path makes it easier for states to
make their goals yearly. This type of path is the most logical approach by giving your
school the same goal each year. Once schools get to know how they need to perform each
year, then they will be more likely to reach their goal. The third type of trajectory that
schools are using to reach the goal of 100% is a “blended trajectory” (Smyth 5) This is a
mixture of both the other trajectories and it has no set perimeters for the way that it is put
together. Each year fluctuates to either a smaller or larger gain that year. This school of
thought is that if you follow one of these trajectories to meet AYP than you will be more
likely to reach your goal because you will know what it is you have to reach.
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The second school of thought for making AYP is the idea of including Special
Education and other subgroups into the general populations of their typically achieving
peers. One major complaint from schools is that with a large number of children with
disabilities, they will not be able to make annually yearly progress because of their low
test scores. The solution given to schools through the No Child Left Behind legislation is
that they can choose either to include students with special needs in the normal
population, or they can put them into a separate subgroup that will be looked at separately
from the rest of the school (Olson 2). Schools can choose to focus on these students
because they are at greatest risk of not making the progress required for the year. If
schools choose to separate their students with disabilities into a separate subgroup, then
they must include only a certain percentage of that subgroup in with the general
education once that subgroup reaches a certain size. “80 percent of the schools that made
AYP in 2003 and 2004, did so without having to meet standards of proficiency for their
special education students as a separate subgroup” (Olson 1). The larger the minimum
number required by states to count a subgroup as separate varies from state to state. The
reason that a state would choose a high number over a lower number is that the higher the
number the less likely they would have to include the entire group in their accountability.
Schools other choice besides not including a high percentage of children with disabilities
is the full inclusion of students with disabilities. The reason that most schools do not use
this form of inclusion is because it makes it harder for them to reach AYP, therefore they
would choose the easier route to get there.
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The third school of thought that schools are using to make AYP are the ways in
which they are teaching their students. Since World War I, schools “have been using
standardized testing instruments to assess performance in K-12 public schools (Smyth
133). This moved our nation into looking at standardized testing as the way of evaluating
how our students are performing in the classroom. One form teachers have adopted to
make AYP is the process of “teaching the test” to their students (Ryan and Weinsten).
The consequence of putting so much emphasis on the performance on tests is putting
pressure on both teachers and students to perform on tests. Because of this pressure,
teachers began teaching their students exactly what is going to be on the test without any
variation and this leaves a lot of important knowledge that students would actually use
out of the curriculum. This leaves a lot to be desired for students while they are in class
and leads to a likelihood that teachers leaving the profession all together (Butzin 768).
Another approach that teachers take when they are trying to make AYP by “teaching the
test” is by focusing on those students closest to reaching a higher level of performance
(Ryan and Weinsten). What this means is that they focus on students in the middle of the
academic curve, and leave out people who are either ahead or behind. This works because
the kids that they focus their instruction on are more likely to perform better on tests
because they are receiving the most instruction from the teacher. The kids in this middle
group are the majority of learners in the classroom; therefore by focusing on them the
likelihood of making AYP increases because the number of students that are going to
make AYP increases. This is a good reason for teachers to use this method because they
will be more likely to get the support they need once they have made the AYP for a year.
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Because of how difficult it is to make AYP schools need to focus on getting there early
and than being able to make more progress as the years go on.
The form that I think is the most effective way to reach AYP is the idea of
mapping out exactly how you want to make the progress yearly. This will help schools to
know exactly how much progress they have to make yearly and what they have to do to
get there. It does not matter if schools choose to use the back-loaded, incremental, or
blended trajectories, by mapping out exactly how much progress is needed for their
school to get to where they have to be for the year will increase the likelihood that they
will get there. The best plan out of the three to get to their AYP mark yearly is the
“incremental approach” to making AYP. Through this path they will be making the same
amount of progress each year and they will eventually get in the flow and be able to make
that progress much more easily than if their goal was changing every year. While the
“back-loaded approach” will make it much easier for schools to make AYP in the early
years of program. It will eventually make things much harder in later years because their
goals will increase from having to make minimal or no gain to having to make very large
gains in a short time. Even schools that use the “blended trajectory approach” are at risk
of not always making AYP in the years where they have more significant gains. The
inconsistency of the amount of progress that a school has to make each year may lead to
them overachieving on a year that need to only make minimal gains, and underachieving
or “failing” during a year when they are supposed to make a substantial gain in their AYP
(CEP 3-5)
The reasons that I believe the first school of thought are better than removing
subgroups from the entire student population is because of the discrimination that is
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brought upon by it. By removing children with disabilities from the assessment based on
the idea that they cannot perform as well as other students on tests seems like a conflict
of laws. The No Child Left Behind legislation is what allows students with disabilities to
be counted separate, but laws prior to it state that you can not discriminate against a
student because of their disability alone. So if a student is not making the test scores
required for them to make AYP based on their disability than how can a school not
include them in the assessment (Olson 2). Another issue that arises with students with
disabilities is the idea that all children should be making AYP each year, when IDEA
legislation states that every child in Special Education should be allowed to work and
progress at their own rate. This is problem because when you expect children with
disabilities to perform and make the same amount of progress as a child without a
disability, you forget why they have their IEP in the first place (Olson 2). Another big
issue within using a subgroup to classify students in Special Education during AYP
assessments is the idea of a school that is made up of only students with disabilities. How
can you only count a percentage of an entire population, or if you look at the school as a
whole and all the students are not making AYP, than they will be considered failing.
The reasons why I do not believe that “teaching the test” and middle level focused
teaching are not the best way to make AYP is because there are a lot of problems with
those sorts of teaching methods. When you teach the test, you take away the teachers
ability to make knowledge applicable to a child’s life. If a child believes that they do not
need the information past the time when they take the test, than they will only retain the
information long enough for them to take the test and be done with it. This is not the
purpose of education; the purpose of education is not for children to be good test takers,
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but for children to gain knowledge that will use in their everyday lives as adults. For
teachers focusing education only on the students that they believe are most likely to reach
their AYP goal they are missing the kids that are high achieving and the kids that are low
achieving. This is a problem because those that are underachieving will fall even further
behind than before, and those that were high achieving have the possibility of not
continuing to be the high performer students that they would be if teachers would give
them the same kind of attention that they give the other students. Another way for us to
make our education system better is to perhaps do what other top countries do. For
instance, other top countries in education around the world do not have test focused
curriculums. Instead of having their students spend countless hours studying to take a
test, they have programs that require them to “read poetry and novels, conduct
experiments in chemistry and physics, create music, and study important historical
issues” (Ravitch and Cortese 35). The United States is the only country in the world that
believes that children should have master basic skills before they are in college.
There are many reasons why educators and administrators have a lot of problems
with the No Child Left Behind legislation. No Child Left Behind is a very ambitious
piece of legislation that puts a lot of pressure on schools and teachers to perform. It
leaves a lot of big problems within the hands of schools, but does not give them the
adequate funding to support the implementation of what they need to succeed to its
standards. Good teachers are being labeled as inadequate and schools that should be
making the AYP are not making it and being labeled as failing. There are many things
that could be changed about the legislation when it comes up for reauthorization that will
make it work better for schools. It may be too ambitious to ask for every school in the
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United States to have 100% adequacy in reading, math, and science so soon after the
legislation was passed. What the legislation should most likely be looking for is a way for
ever school no matter what the circumstances to make some progress each year and hope
that one day they will reach the maximum possible. It was the first try on a law that will
forever change the way people look at education and I believe that once the law is made
into a law that works well in all aspects that it will be one of the most significant pieces
of legislation ever passed.
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Works Cited
Ryan, Richard M. Weinstein, Netta “Undermining quality teaching and learning: A self
determination theory perspective on high-stakes testing.” Theory and Research in
Education (2009) 224-233.
Smyth, Theoni Soublis. “Who Is No Child Left Behind Leaving Behind?” Clearing
House Jan. and Feb. 2008
Butzin, Sarah M. “NCLB: Fix It, Don’t Nix It” Phi Delta Kappan (2007)
Vannest, Kimberly J. “ Educator and Administrator Perceptions of the Impact of No
Child Left Behind on Special Populations” Remedial and Special Education (2009)
Ravitch, Diane Cortese, Antonia “Why We’re Behind: What Top Nations Teach Their
Students But We Don’t” The Education Digest (June 2009)
Olson, Lynn “AYP Rules Miss Many in Special Education: More Students Left Out of
Accountability Ratings” Education Week (2005)
Chudowsky, Vic. Chudowsky Naomi “Many States Have Taken a “Backloaded”
Approach to No Child Left Behind Goal of All Students Scoring “Proficient” Center on
Education Policy (2008)
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The Students with Disabilties Subgroup and Adequately Yearly Progress in Mid-Atlantic
Schools
