A Quarter of Schools Behind in AYP

The early numbers on NCLB status for American schoolsdon't look so good.

About half the states increased the number of schools making "adequate yearly progress" in improving student test scores in math and reading in the 2004-05 school year. Overall, 27 percent of the schools failed to show adequate improvement, up one percentage point from the year before.

My theory on the AYP for schools as NCLB ages is that more and more schools will start slipping on AYP (Adequate yearly progress) because early successes were just a bounce, as time goes on it will get harder and harder to get more students proficient.

Critics of the law will say it just proves that you can't teach every child. But really, the inability to make AYP as the law moves forward is more indicative of a failure to change the way we teach kids. For a long time, people, including many teachers, assumed that a certain percentage of kids were essentially "unteachable" and simply resigned themselves to the failure of those kids. But with NCLB, more and more teachers understand that accountability in education means accountability for each and every child.

The problem is that the mindset among senior administrators is that it can't be done and thus, a self-fullfilling prophecy entails and AYP can't be done.