Prior to the release of the state standardized test results at the beginning of August, the federal Education Department denied the state’s application to add a new way of calculating student performance when it comes to the federal No Child Left Behind Act.
Earlier this year the state applied to be included in a pilot program called a “growth model,” which enables schools to meet adequate yearly progress if a sufficient number of students are improving on the state standardized tests, even if the students fail to test proficiently under the traditional method.
Nine states have already received some sort of an approval to include the new method of assessing test data, which public school officials say is supposed to encourage schools that have traditionally failed to meet testing benchmarks and may have lost hope of ever meeting “adequate yearly progress.” Adequate yearly progress is a term defined by the No Child Left Behind Act that requires an ever increasing number of students to meet testing benchmarks annually with the goal that all students will test at grade level in reading and math by the school year 2013-14.
Schools that fail to meet adequate yearly progress enter into a series of increasingly severe designations that can force schools to make changes in staff and structure. Schools that repeatedly fail to meet the standards are required to notify parents at the beginning of the school year, and parents can choose to send their students to schools that perform better on the tests.
According to New Mexico’s model, all students who failed to score at the proficient level would become a subgroup for the growth model. If a certain number of students in the subgroup showed sufficient progress toward meeting proficiency by 2014, then the school would be making adequate yearly progress. Each student would have an individual testing trajectory based on the previous year’s scores that would lead to proficiency by 2014, and if they scored along or above that trajectory, they would be making adequate yearly progress through the growth model.
“It was innovative and they thought it was a good idea, but it was beyond the scope of the pilot growth model problem,” Carlos Martinez, of the state Education Department, said.
In the letter of denial sent to state Secretary of Education Veronica Garcia in June, the federal government complimented the proposal’s focus on low-performing students, but said there were several reasons that led to the denial.
In particular, Kerri Briggs, the assistant secretary for elementary and secondary education at the federal Education Department, said the model did not study certain types of students sufficiently. Under No Child Left Behind schools have to not only have a certain percentage of their student body testing at a proficient level, but they also have to show the same strength in different areas, called subgroups including minority students, English Language Learners and special education students. Schools do not meet state standards under the Act if one of the subgroups fails to meet state testing benchmarks. For example, San Juan Elementary met all the state’s testing benchmarks this year except for its English language learners, who failed to meet math testing goals. Therefore, even though the school as a whole met state standards, it was designated a failing school earlier this month because of that particular subgroup.
The subgroup idea is a central tenant to No Child Left Behind meant to force schools to focus on students that may have been neglected in the past. The state’s proposal for the growth plan would have only measured progress among the non-proficient students, an enormous sea of students, and would not have required schools to show growth in the smaller subgroups.
“No evidence was submitted to ensure that the gains of some students would not compensate for a lack of growth among other students,” Briggs wrote in her letter of denial.
Martinez said part of the difficulty was the low population density in many school districts across the state. He said of the nine states that have been approved — Arizona, Arkansas, Delaware, Florida, Iowa, Michigan, Missouri, North Carolina and Tennessee — most had a higher population density than New Mexico.
Martinez said nothing prohibits the state from calculating districts’ growth anyway, though it would not have any affect on a school’s testing designation and would not be released in the same report.
Martinez said he has been instructed by Garcia to apply for the growth model again next year.