In what seems to have become the data-driven age of education, local school officials are drilling down into the annual Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) scores and school report cards released by the MIchigan Department of Education Monday.
The AYP is considered a measure of performance of district schools as a requirement of the No Child Left Behind Act.
This year, the scores are coming under some criticism.
Scores in part are based on the performance of students on the Michigan Educational Assessment Program (MEAP). Under No Child Left Behind, school districts are expected to have a 100 percent of their students passing the MEAP by 2013.
But what counts for “proficient” in regard to those tests keeps changing.
According to the MDE, under federal No Child Left Behind, all states are required to establish annual English language arts and mathematic proficiency targets. Those targets must reach 100 percent by the 2013-14 school year. During the past school year, the percent of students needing to be proficient on state assessments was raised by an average of 10 percent, in order to meet that target.
Will districts be able to achieve 100 percent by 2013?
“I just don’t see it,” said Richard Weigel, superintendent of Niles Community Schools.
Weigel’s remarks came after the district’s scores were presented to the board of education by Dan Applegate, director of special education for the district.
The superintendent called the MEAP test a “moving target” with its proficiency levels increasing annually, making it an unreliable source of information.
“This makes the MEAP a very unreliable tool,” he told board members. “And yet we’re being judged by it.”
And those comments come with relatively positive scores for the district.
The district achieved AYP. As for school report cards, Niles received “As” for Ballard Elementary School, Howard Elementary School, Oak Manor Sixth Grade Center and Ring Lardner Middle School. Niles High School received a “B.”
“An ‘A’ looks good,” Applegate said Monday night. “And if someone looks at that and doesn’t drill down any further, an ‘A’ looks good.”
In discussing the report Tuesday, Applegate clarified, “Many factors are used to determine grades: attendance rates, graduation rate, student growth and proficiency levels on state assessments and other indicators of school performance which have shown to have the greatest effect on student achievement.
“These results are cause for celebration, however, we are pushing ourselves as a district and a community to reach higher levels of achievement that may not be able to be directly assessed by the MEAP,” he said. “These results only tell us that we are moving students across a state-determined threshold — the cut score — but do not provide useful information for our teachers about students who were already above that threshold the previous year in terms of achievement growth. As a district, we are focusing on assessments which identify growth for each individual student to make informed instructional decisions.”
So just what do the AYP scores then mean?
According to the MDE’s report, when it comes to key performance areas for the 2010-2011 school year —  third grade reading proficiency, student academic growth, students proficient in math and reading in grades 3-8, ACT composite scores, ACT college readiness scores and four-year graduation rates — the district’s performance dropped in every category.
Applegate says that’s where the confusion kicks in.
“We’re going to have to look at how those numbers are determined,” Applegate said. “I don’t know if that’s a negative statistic.”
How the numbers are being reported, he added, is new to officials, but Applegate said he plans to provide a more in-depth presentation to the board in the future.

‘Not totally accurate,’ says Jarpe
At Brandywine Community Schools, Supt. John Jarpe would agree the assessment may not be the most accurate of tools for school officials.
“I’m pleased that we made AYP as a district and four out of the five buildings made AYP,” he said.
In the Brandywine district, Merritt and Brandywine Elementary Schools scored “As” on their report cards; Brandywine Middle School received a “B”; and Brandywine High School received a “C.”
Bell Alternative Education Center did not make AYP.
“That was due to the graduation rate, from what we can gather,” Jarpe said. “We did show improvement on our test scores from last year.”
The results are good compared to some school districts, he said, which have not been able to keep up with the changing proficiencies and expectations coming down from the state.
Still, Jarpe said, he’s not totally satisfied with certain aspects of the report.
“I think it’s a real broad kind of measure and breaking it down into all the subcategories,” he said. “It wasn’t us this year, but many schools throughout the state that didn’t make AYP because their special education subgroup did not achieve at a rate as everyone else … there’s a reason why some are in special education and learning is tougher for them … should they be measured at the same standards as everyone else?
“I think there’s something to be said for other types of measurement than what they’re looking at here,” Jarpe said.
To learn more, visit www.mischooldata.org.