Meeting the Challenge of Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP)

by Troy V. Mariage, Ph.D. and Linda Patriarca, Ph.D.

Improving Student Outcomes Through Systemic Reform

A significant feature of both the 1997 re-authorization of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) and the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) is the fundamental shift toward ensuring that all students—including those with disabilities—make “adequate yearly progress” (AYP) toward achieving rigorous curriculum standards. Most educators support the spirit of NCLB—ensuring that all children make progress toward achieving high standards. However, many school leaders struggle with knowing just how to reach that goal.

This FOCUS on Results document will begin to address the question “What can local school buildings/districts do to ensure that the spirit of No Child Left Behind is realized?” To this end, we identify five overarching principles of successful school improvement:

• Accountability is outcomes-based but input- and process-driven.
• Student achievement requires alignment, cohesion, and coordination of curricula.
• Schools facilitate student achievement when they develop and adopt a system of differentiated instruction to meet all students’ needs.
• Schools sustain improved student outcomes when they have a collaborative infrastructure that supports improvements in curricula and teaching.
• Leadership is vital for creating and sustaining a schoolwide focus on continuous improvement.

These principles and the ideas presented in this FOCUS on Results document are based on current research literature on school reform as well as the authors’ own research results.

Accountability Is Outcomes-Based But Input- and Process-Driven.

Schools are being held accountable for outcomes—data that show the school has made improvements that result in students reaching high educational standards. For example, do school data show that students’ behavior, knowledge, understanding, abilitiy, skills, and/or attitudes change as a result of participating in a program or receiving services?

In order to show improvements in student achievement, schools must attend to inputs (e.g. curriculum, school culture, teaching practices, etc. that influence what and how students learn) and processes (the ways teachers or schools deliver education).

Collecting more and more outcome data will not fundamentally change instructional practices. Schools must become committed to and organized around a disciplined inquiry approach to data collection. Becoming “disciplined in inquiry” means that all educators come to use data and other information to inform the decision-making process.

Data collected early in the school improvement process provides a baseline of performance that allows a building or district to focus attention on areas of high need. This data can relate to a variety of outcomes: attendance, rate of referral for special education, Michigan Educational Assessment Program (MEAP) achievement, parent satisfaction, and more.

Collecting data on a regular basis, over long periods of time, allows the building or district staff to monitor changes and evaluate the impact of its efforts. Schools can reach high standards when educators are able to design, collect, and evaluate data and communicate this data to external audiences such as families and
communities.

Curriculum Alignment, Coordination, and Cohesion Are Key

To improve student achievement, schools must ensure that all students receive a comprehensive curriculum that is aligned to core curriculum standards, coordinated within and across grade levels/buildings, and cohesive in terms of knowledge, assessment, teaching, and learning. Such a curriculum allows the district to target professional development to improve teaching, generate assessment tools, and develop differentiated instruction for students achieving significantly above or below grade level.

Develop a System of Differentiated Instruction

Effective schools meet the educational needs of ALL students. This requires a system that both informs and responds to curriculum, teaching, and learning styles. Differentiated instruction recognizes students’ varying background knowledge, readiness, language, preferences in learning, and interests and reacts responsively. The intent of differentiating instruction is to maximize each student’s growth and individual success by meeting each student where s/he is, and assisting in the learning process.

While a coherent system of differentiated instruction may look different across buildings and grade levels, such a system requires several key elements:

• • Carefully selected assessment measures for key areas (e.g., reading, math, writing, social skills).
• Regularly scheduled time and space for collaborative problem solving around student needs.
• Curricular or instructional tiers that provide a range of programs and services spanning prevention, intervention, remediation, and acceleration.
• Opportunities for varied types of targeted instruction within each tier to meet the needs of a widely ranging student population. Instructional options might include increased opportunities to learn through before/after school tutoring, summer school programming, or initiatives that strengthen home/school partnerships.

A Collaborative Infrastructure Supports and Sustains Improvement

Structural aspects of a school or district often pose serious obstacles to effective school improvement. Curriculum, instruction, social climate, and other variables can directly affect students and how much they learn. School structure changes that influence these variables can affect achievement, and they should be linked to the long- and short-term goals expressed in the planning process.

A collaborative infrastructure involves creating and supporting “physical and mental spaces and places” where teachers gather to learn, problem-solve, discuss, and debate issues most relevant to their lives and success as teachers (e.g., grade level planning, intervention assistance teams, curriculum design teams, teacher study groups). Further, a collaborative infrastructure requires that professional development be coordinated, continuous, purposeful, and focused on helping teachers achieve the target goals identified in the planning process.

Professional development must be experiential. Teachers must have multiple and varied opportunities to engage in “guided practice” situations, where they use the “research-based strategies” they hear about. Teachers also need to systematically study the effects of their practice.

Professional development must take place both in formal, school-wide contexts (e.g., coaching, in-service, curriculum planning teams) as well as in a variety of voluntary collaborative contexts (e.g., study groups, summer school, action-research networks). In essence, the goal of developing a collaborative infrastructure is to transform schools from places where individuals work in relative isolation to places where teachers, administrators, parents, and students work together in professional communities of practice dedicated to continuous self-assessment and self-improvement.

Leadership Is Key to Creating and Sustaining a Schoolwide Focus on Continuous Improvement

Research shows that strong leadership is critically important in transforming schools into learning organizations, where educators create the time, places, and spaces needed to make sure schools focus on the continual development of their members.

Effective leaders share leadership strategically among many stakeholder groups: faculty, staff, parents, and students. In essence, strong leaders are not only effective managers or instructional leaders but also cultural change agents (Fullan, 2002). Leading for cultural change requires individuals who:

• Value collaborative problem solving.
• Use information and data to inform key decisions.
• Hold themselves accountable for helping all students succeed—academically, socially, and emotionally.
• Ensure that the family and community are partners in the education process.
• Recognize that each person plays an important role in creating a culture of positive interventions and support within and outside of the classroom.

Effective leaders take the important first step of identifying and making visible the values, dispositions, beliefs, and visions of the organization. Then they work with others—intentionally, persistently, and collaboratively—to make continuous improvement a key goal of the organization. Finally, effective leaders share leadership by building the unique capacities of each member of the learning organization.

Continuous Improvement Takes Time and Focus

If schools and districts are to meet the challenges of AYP, they must increase their capacity to improve student achievement and sustain these improvements over time. Schools must create professional cultures dedicated to continuous improvement and disciplined inquiry. Such a long-term effort begins by looking closely at the school’s current strengths and needs. To this end, we offer four questions:

1. Does the building/district have a system and an infrastructure for generating assessments that provide continuous data that teachers can use in a timely way to inform instruction and understand patterns of performance of groups of students over time (e.g., grade level data, building data, disability type, race, gender)?
2. Does the building/district have a system and an infrastructure that allow the staff to continually monitor and develop its curricular alignment and implementation, teaching skills, and evaluation plan?
3. Does the building/district have a system and infrastructure that allow the staff to monitor student performance using multiple data points, create opportunities for accelerating instruction, and provide differentiated instruction to ensure that no learners “fall through the cracks”?
4. Does the building/district have evidence to demonstrate that deep changes in the culture of the building are taking place? For example:
   
   a) Changes in the capacity of stakeholders to use data to inform the decision-making process.
   b) Enhanced quality of collaborative problem solving in communities of practice.
   c) Improved instructional practices that lead to demonstrable changes in student learning.
   d) An increased number of entry points available for professional development.
   e) Greater levels of teacher satisfaction on key indicators of effective professional growth (e.g., effectiveness, meaningfulness, connectedness, professionalism, and empowerment)?

Conclusion

Ensuring that ALL students learn and achieve high standards is not an easy task. However, schools can make adequate yearly progress toward that goal when they use student data to make decisions about instruction, align and balance curricula, differentiate instruction, and create school cultures dedicated to continuous improvement.