Fewer county schools make feds’ grade

By Emily Richmond

Tuesday, July 22, 2008 | 2 a.m.

In December, Clark County School District officials warned that the number of campuses making adequate progress under the federal No Child Left Behind law this year might drop by nearly half.

On Thursday, the district will announce which schools made adequate yearly progress on standardized test scores and which fell short. Because the state has raised the bar for student achievement this year, some predicted only 117 schools might meet the standard known as AYP, down from 213.

The number of schools making AYP did indeed go down, but it isn’t the plummet many had feared.

“It’s not going to be as bad as we were projecting,” said Sue Daellenbach, testing director for the district.

Superintendent Walt Rulffes said most schools showed improvement in at least one area. In some cases the gains were dramatic but still weren’t enough to qualify as adequate progress under the law.

“It’s either punish or reward,” Rulffes said. “We’re forced to split hairs, and that’s not right.”

The district and state education officials plan to be finalizing the list of schools right up until Thursday morning’s news conference to announce the results.

Last year, 52 percent of the district’s schools made adequate progress, up from one-third in 2005-06.

One reason for the pessimism about this year’s results: It’s the first year since the law took effect in 2002 that more than half of elementary and middle school students must be proficient in reading and math. The threshold for adequate progress has also been raised for high school students.

At the elementary and middle school level the bar was raised by just more than 11 percentage points in math, and by 12 percentage points for reading and writing. At the high school level, the increases were 4.4 percentage points for reading and nearly 10 percentage points for math. The increases are the steepest Nevada’s schools have seen thus far.

Under the federal education law, 100 percent of all public school students must demonstrate proficiency in reading, writing and mathematics by the 2013-14 academic year. Schools must meet benchmarks for overall performance and participation as well as for subgroups of students, broken down by ethnicity, special education status, limited English proficiency and those qualifying for free and reduced-priced meals.

Schools that fail to make adequate progress for one year are placed on a “watch list.” Two consecutive years of falling short earn a school the label of “needs improvement.” With each successive year on the list sanctions against schools increase, from having to offer students transfers to more successful campuses to the replacement of key staff to a takeover by the state and finally the federal government.

Individual student results have already been mailed. Lauren Kohut-Rost, deputy superintendent of curriculum and instruction, said those are the numbers parents should focus on more than the schoolwide results to be announced Thursday.

No Child Left Behind has become a source of frustration for many educators, who believe the law is punitive and sets unreasonable expectations. It doesn’t take much for a school to be labeled “needs improvement.” Failing to have 95 percent of eligible students present for testing can do it, or low performance by just one or two students in a particular subgroup.

But even the law’s harshest critics agree it has been beneficial to require states and local districts to track students by subgroups. It has yielded a wealth of data that previously went unreported.

Campuses that exceed the benchmarks by 20 percent or show a significant reduction in the percentage of low-scoring students are designated as “high achieving.” Schools that do both are identified as “exemplary.”

States were allowed some leeway in determining their paths to the 2014 goal of 100 percent proficiency. Nevada opted for steady increases in minimum scores on standardized tests.

In 2006, the U.S. Education Department also began allowing a few states to use what’s known as a “growth model” to measure adequate progress. That means schools are judged adequate provided they improve substantially over their prior year’s performance, even if they do not meet the state’s targets.

Nevada’s requests to switch to a growth model have so far been denied by the feds. The earliest the state can reapply for the growth model is 2011.

No Child Left Behind is up for reauthorization, and major changes have been recommended to Congress by various committees and coalitions that have formed in the law’s tumultuous wake. However, Keith Rheault, Nevada’s superintendent of public instruction, said he’s been told by the feds to expect the status quo to hold for at least the next two years.