The Tennessee Department of Education released Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) Results for state public schools yesterday. Sylvan Park Paideia Elementary School was listed as a target school, meaning that it "missed a federal benchmark in at least one area for the first time."
Background from today's Tennessean story about the announcement: "Under the federal No Child Left Behind law, public schools are required to test all students in reading and math each year in grades 3-8 and at least once in high school. Schools can be identified as needing improvement if they fall short overall, in any student subgroup, or in other indicators such as attendance and graduation rates."
More information from the Tennessee Department of Education Web site: "There are no sanctions for target schools. The Tennessee Department of Education offers technical assistance to help keep target schools from becoming high priority schools. "
This PDF file on the state site answers several questions I had about NCLB, AYP and exactly what it means. Here's an important bit of information to keep in mind regarding target schools such as Sylvan Park:
"No Child Left Behind has very stringent requirements. A school must meet standards in every category and every subgroup – including demonstrating 95% participation on assessments – or else it does not meet the federal benchmark and is identified as a target school or high priority school. If, for example, the test was given on a day when many students were absent, it is possible that fewer than 95% of students took the test, causing the school to miss the benchmark."
Because NCLB is so rigorous, it sounds like this isn't a major concern, but I thought it was worth noting as neighborhood news. Anyone else have light to shed?
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