The complexities of Adequate Yearly Progress, and the need to meet the AYP goals, were discussed Wednesday evening at a meeting of the Emporia school board.
Superintendent John Heim told the board that because the state board of education made changes in the reading and mathematics tests that generate the AYP data, educators now can compare only the progress of groups of students.
“We can say ‘Our fourth graders this year compared to our fourth graders last year.’ ...They didn’t make individual comparisons available or possible so we don’t have that capability,” Heim said. “I think it was a mistake by the state board of education not to be able to do that.”
The changes create difficulties in measuring progress of students, according to the district’s strategic plan. The plan states that USD 253 educators are concerned with raising proficiency of each individual student. Each student in the district, however, must be proficient in reading and math by 2013.
The new tests are given to children in grades three through eight and one high-school grade level, which provides 14 different opportunities for youngsters to be tested, compared to the previous six tests.
“It gives us a larger group of students to pull from when we get to subgroups,” Heim said, adding that subgroups are used as measurement tools to track progress in meeting the mandated proficiency percentages. “They don’t just look at your all-students group, they look at subgroups.”
Subgroups are any group of at least 30 students that meet criteria for a subgroup, such as special education, racial or ethnic background, socio-economic status and other groups. Because of the size of the Emporia district, the federal government has identified seven subgroups here out of a possible nine.
“Then we also have to take separate subgroups and look at them and each of those subgroups have to be at 60% or we don’t make adequate progress,” Heim said. “So, we have more opportunities for success and more opportunities for our students not to make it.”
Some students qualify for inclusion in more than one subgroup, which may skew percentages for those groups. Some of the 284 students in the special education subgroup were incorrectly placed by the state, which Heim believes will prevent the district from making AYP this year.
“The information I’m sharing with you tonight is actually under appeal with the state board of education,” he said. “A student can count against you multiple times or count for you multiple times. That’s a flaw in the law, we believe, and we’re trying to get that fixed.”
The math and reading tests did show that English Language learners, Hispanics and African-Americans achieved AYP, and the all-students group was at 73 percent in mathematics.
“We’re not sure if we made AYP in reading but we know we’re going to be close. We’re sure we made AYP in math,” Heim said.
If the district does not meet AYP, “we have to develop a plan that looks at the data, which we’ve done forever in Emporia anyway, make some judgments about what the data tells us about instruction, and make some adjustments,” he said. “We’ve already started to develop that plan anyway. That’s basically the only implication right now of not making AYP.
“We’re proud of what we’ve done, but we’ve got more work to do.”
Read about the district audit and other board meeting topics in Thursday's Gazette.