Evaluating the Mandate for Adequate Yearly Progress

As school administrators seek to interpret and respond to the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, three educational researchers take issue with its mandated annual progress requirement for the nation's public schools.

Testing experts Robert L. Linn, University of Colorado; Eva L. Baker, University of California, Los Angeles; and Damian W. Betebenner, University of Colorado, offer modifications that would ensure both accountability and achievable goals. Their analysis, "Accountability Systems: Implications of Requirements of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001," appears in the August/September 2002 issue of Educational Researcher, published by the American Educational Research Association.

The No Child Left Behind (NCLB) legislation requires that each school make yearly progress or face classification as a school in need of improvement. In addition, all students, including groupings identified by ethnicity, economic status, disability, and English proficiency, must test at the proficient level within 12 years.

"The notion is that given enough pressure from the accountability system and additional resources, the schools will improve and the goal will be met," the scholars write. "One can agree that schools should improve and that holding schools accountable will contribute to improvement but still conclude that the goal of having 100 percent of students reaching the proficient level . . . is so high that it is completely out of reach."

The requirement to measure yearly progress necessitates establishment of performance standards on state tests. In many states, ambitious proficiency levels were established before the federal legislation exacted consequences for failure to meet targeted goals, resulting in proficiency levels too difficult for all students to attain by 2014. Currently, no state or country is close to meeting such a high performance level.

Another difficulty the researchers address is equity among states and their individual testing programs. Content standards and associated tests are much more ambitious in some states than in others, and those with the most rigorous standards have a more difficult task to reach their objectives.

The researchers suggest that guidance from the U.S. Department of Education could help to define adequate yearly progress objectives that are challenging but feasible to achieve. Although state tests are too disparate to be used for comparison, the use of National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) test scores, required biennially for fourth and eighth graders in reading and mathematics, as a benchmark might level the playing field across states. The National Assessment of Educational Progress is also called "The Nation's Report Card."

The authors recommend 100 percent achievement at the NAEP basic level, rather than proficient, as "an alternative that still would be quite ambitious but possibly more attainable with sufficient effort and resources. . . .If the percentages of students within each state who achieved at the basic level or higher on NAEP were used as a benchmark against which state standards of performance could be compared, it would assure that state standards were less disparate than they now are."