AYP Pressure Mounts

Thursday, October 2, 2008, the Denver Post announced that only 48 of 151 Denver Public Schools schools met the adequate yearly progress (AYP) goals mandated by NCLB law.   The article went on to report that statewide only 60% of Colorada schools met their progress targets, compared with 75% that met the target goals in 2007.  The Colorado Department of Education attributed this decline to the schedule of AYP improvement that the law outlines.  According to the NCLB law, every three years the bar is raised to meet the AYP goals, which are to culminate in 100% proficiency by the school year 2013-14.  This was a “goal-raising” year, so more students and more schools failed to meet the target goals.

How fast can they go?  Can you speed students’ progress up by simply mandating higher scores?  Will it improve schools to show that more and more of them are not showing incrementally higher aggregated student scores?  What about changing populations?  What about a sudden influx of children who come to school with no English language skills?  How will teachers “speed them up” to meet annual yearly progress goals?  What about the lower third of any population who are “below average?”  Did the framers of the NCLB really believe that they could raise all children alike up to “average?”  Or is that the point?  Is the goal of NCLB to level the performance outcomes across the board so that  ALL students are average?

There seems to be a terrible blind spot in the reasoning behind NCLB, AYP, and all the Assessments designed to measure the goals associated with the mandates of this law.  Those mandates and measures are aimed at regulating human beings.

My own class this year is full of individual case studies, 30 of them.  Each student is a complex combination of innate abilities and accumulated experiences that add up to a unique set of competencies and needs.  Each one requires thoughtful consideration as a special learner.  If a teacher does not spend time considering the individual learner’s uniqueness, it will be unlikely that the teacher can find that zone of proximal development (a Vygotsky idea) where the individual is open and receptive to new learning.

The teacher must have the time and freedom to locate each learner’s proximal zone.  Giving standardized tests the benefit of the doubt, benchmarks and all, that zone is very seldom unveiled on a formal assessment.  It appears in the daily interactions that occur in the processes of teaching and learning.  It is a human judgment, a set of human interractions that can not be quantified.  Progress for each child is unique, a step along their own path that advances them towards realizing their human potential.  If we continue to try squeezing all these unique individuals onto the same path and try to measure their steps in equal terms, we will squander that human potential that constitutes the future of our culture.