The long and the short of Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP)
By Rich Kronberg, NEA-Alaska President

By now, we are all familiar… some would say all too familiar… with the term Adequate Yearly Progress, or AYP for short. This is the federal yardstick used to judge schools under the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, known as No Child Left Behind (NCLB.) This month's column will deal with our pro-active response to the release of this year's list of schools that did not make AYP. My next column will discuss our longer-range strategy to deal with AYP and other NCLB issues.

The results released last month show that about two-thirds of our schools did not meet this standard. (In Florida, by contrast, 88% of the schools did not make AYP.) Under NEA-Alaska's leadership, the education community came together in advance and hammered out appropriate and complementary messages. All of us have worked hard to inform the public that not making AYP is not the same as being a lousy school. Our work is just beginning. NEA-Alaska's messages around AYP have been:

This is diagnostic information and should not lead to finger pointing. Test results disaggregated by subgroups is new information, and it should be used to help schools target resources and programs to students who need additional help. (See the ESEA/NCLB section of our website, www.neaalaska.org, for detailed information.) Also, our members need the test results broken out to inform our own instruction.

These results should cause our school districts and the state to refocus efforts on providing all our students what they need for success. As the NCLB law recognizes, the most critical of these elements is access to high quality teachers and other high quality educators.

All students can make progress. Despite this, it is becoming clearer every day that the Adequate Yearly Progress of special education students should not be measured in exactly the same way it is measured for their non-disabled peers. This is not fair, either to those students or to their schools.

Schools and school personnel cannot do this alone. We need the support of parents and communities. Healthy schools exist inside healthy communities. Successful schools are everyone's business.

NEA-Alaska is committed to doing whatever we can to make a difference for our children and our schools. Over the next few months we will continue to implement our strategic plan for achieving success under No Child Left Behind: To educate and motivate the public to pressure the governor and legislators to provide our schools with adequate resources.