Education Sector: Media Room: For Release: What It Means to Make 'Adequate Yearly Progress' Under NCLB

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Who We Are » Media Room » Education Sector Press Releases » For Release: What It Means to Make 'Adequate Yearly Progress' Under NCLB

Media Room

Education Sector Press Releases

For Release: What It Means to Make 'Adequate Yearly Progress' Under NCLB

New Education Sector Explainer is a guide to understanding NCLB's complex accountability system

Publication Date:: July 24, 2007

For Immediate Release
Contact: Education Sector Communications Office, (202) 552-2849

Washington, D.C. — As the federal No Child Left Behind Act makes it way toward reauthorization, much of the debate will be about the law's central accountability system. Under NCLB, states must set performance targets for schools to meet, known as "adequate yearly progress," or "AYP." And those schools that do not meet these goals or "make" AYP face considerable consequences.

But what does it really mean for a school to make AYP? There are a number of factors that go into the decision, and most of these factors vary from state to state. Thus, calculating AYP is complicated and often leads to confusion among parents, educators, policymakers, and the media. In a new Education Sector Explainer released today, Policy Analyst Erin Dillon and Co-director Andrew J. Rotherham provide a guide to understanding how NCLB's complex accountability system works overall and in different states. They discuss the basics of "making" AYP and the multiple routes schools can take to get there.

This Explainer includes:

A detailed discussion of the three requirements of AYP: proficiency, participation, and the additional-indicator requirement.
A step-by-step analysis of how states establish their accountability systems and how changes to these systems influence AYP decisions.
An explanation of the most common factors that states include in AYP calculations and how these factors differ from state to state.
A list of the performance targets for elementary, middle, and high schools in each state for school years 2004–05, 2005–06, and 2006–07. Beginning this summer, states will announce schools that have, or have not, met the 2006–07 performance targets.

Read "States' Evidence: What It Means to Make 'Adequate Yearly Progress' Under NCLB."

Education Sector is an independent education policy think tank devoted to developing innovative solutions to the nation’s most pressing educational problems. We are nonprofit and nonpartisan, both a dependable source of sound thinking on policy and an honest broker of evidence in key education debates throughout the United States.

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