12/16/03 -- Large numbers of schools that have been identified as needing improvement for failing to make adequate yearly progress (AYP) under the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) have been removed from state lists after they successfully appealed the designation.
Georgia's state education department initially said 430 schools failed to make AYP, then after the appeals process, whittled that number down to 232. "This shows that Georgia's schools are doing better than originally thought," says state Superintendent Kathy Cox.
Kirk Englehardt, spokesperson for the Georgia Department of Education, says state officials spent at least six hours on each appeal, carefully matching individual student records and test scores.
Noting that test participation was one of the biggest issues in the appeals, Englehardt says, "Now schools realize the importance of good data and making sure students come to school on test day." NCLB requires 95 percent of a students to be tested for a school to make AYP.
He also says there was some confusion about which alternative tests are acceptable for certain students with disabilities.
Among the 84 schools in Gwinnett County, Ga., 36 did not initially make AYP. Nine appealed, and the state approved six of them.
Appeals were approved for four Title I elementary schools, one non-Title I elementary, and one high school. Appeals were approved because of data corrections involving participation rates for Hispanic students, black students, limited-English-proficient students, or students with disabilities.
In a couple of cases it came down to one student, says Debbie Durrence, an assistant principal on special assignment for data reporting. In one example, a review of the records showed that a student had enrolled after the test, and fixing that record was enough to change the school's test participation rate.
In Minnesota, the number of schools failing to make AYP fell from 259 to 144 after the appeals process.
The majority of appeals were approved after schools made corrections to their data.
In some cases, schools were able to show that certain students were unable to participate during the testing window due to circumstances beyond their control, says Greg Abbott, spokesperson for the Minnesota School Boards Association.
Another 18 alternative schools were taken off the list because they were given more flexibility to use either graduation or attendance data to determine whether they made AYP, and four schools were removed because they are under the jurisdiction of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, not the state education department.
Most of the 144 Minnesota schools still on the list failed to make AYP because fewer than 95 percent of students were tested or they failed to achieve average daily attendance of 90 percent, Abbott says.
Two high schools failed to make AYP because of a poor graduation rate. Sixty-four schools are on the list because of poor test scores, including 27 who missed in just one subgroup and 23 who missed in two subgroups. According to Abbott, the three subgroups affected most often were students eligible for free and reduced-price lunches, limited-English speaking students, and black students.
In Pennsylvania, 340 schools filed appeals, and the state approved 239 of them. Appeals were mostly approved to correct data on test participation, graduation rates, and attendance -- not for test score proficiency, says Brian Christopher, spokesperson for the state education department.
In some cases, schools didn't have the latest data for the initial AYP determination, so if they could provide more up-to-date data that showed they met the AYP goals, their appeal was granted, Christopher says.
Appeals also were granted in some special circumstances. For example, an appeal was approved for a small school that missed its attendance requirement because of a flu epidemic.
Not all states have completed the appeals process. In Michigan, more than 1,200 schools filed appeals, and the state education department has not yet announced how many will be approved.
During the second session of the 108th Congress, NSBA will seek legislative changes to address the wide range of operational problems associated with implementing NCLB, including modifying the methodology for calculating participation rates.