Schools adjust to meet test goals

MAT-SU — Some schools in the Mat-Su Borough are looking at ways to catch up after failing to make adequate yearly progress (AYP) required under the federal No Child Left Behind Act.

Three of the Mat-Su Borough School District’s four major high schools — Houston, Wasilla and Palmer — did not make AYP for the 2007-2008 school year. The state Department of Education and Early Development released the results last week, along with citing a statewide decline in schools making AYP.

Officials with the state said a temporary decline in schools making AYP was expected this year since test standards were raised during the past school year. That doesn’t mean local schools aren’t doing their best to do better next year.

At Palmer High School, which made AYP for 2006-2007 but didn’t for this past school year, Principal Wolfgang Winter said he and his teaching staff are taking a serious look at the state NCLB results.

“We’re always concerned if we don’t meet the standard,” Winter said. “And we’re working to improve on that.”

Winter said that he knows in which categories of students — the test is broken down in part to represent different ethnic and socioeconomic groups — his school fared the worst, but declined to release the information until the state Department of Education and Early Development makes it public.

In light of AYP results, Palmer will institute a freshman seminar class beginning this year that will focus on academic organizational skills, Winter said. Students who do not meet certain grade, attendance and discipline standards, along with getting a recommendation from the counseling and teaching staff at the sending school, will be required to take the class.

“Most of the upper-end kids have no problem meeting those criteria,” Winter said.

What has surprised Winter has been the number of students able to opt out of the freshman seminar who want to take it anyway.

“Turns out a lot of kids who would have qualified not to take it, they and their parents said, ‘No, you’re taking it,’” Winter said.

The problem, some educators say, is the general public can misinterpret the meaning of AYP results. Now that the latest annual yearly progress results have been made public, at least one principal is worried some might jump to conclusions.

Cydney Duffin, principal at Colony High School, which made AYP for 2007-2008 after failing for the 2006-2007 school year, said judging a school’s quality based solely on AYP scores is a mistake.

“It’s such a generality to talk about an entire school’s progress based on AYP scores,” Duffin said.

The annual yearly progress assessment is determined by a standardized test given to every student in the school, regardless of their abilities. The test has been a sore spot with many educators nationwide because if one particular group fails to make AYP, such as a certain socioeconomic group, the entire school fails.

“That’s the part educators don’t like about NCLB,” Duffin said.

Another complaint of educators is that students who are new to the country and speak little English must take the same test as everyone else, putting them at a disadvantage, Duffin said. She also said educators must be careful not to place the blame of a school’s AYP failure on a group or groups that fared poorly on the test.

“To point at one sub-group and say it’s their fault we didn’t make AYP this year, that’s wrong,” Duffin said.

Like Duffin, officials with the school district want parents to know the AYP is only one measure of a school’s success, district spokeswoman Catherine Esary said.

“There are many other measures of performance,” Esary said. “That’s not the total picture.”

She added any number of factors can cause a school to miss AYP, such as a too many students being absent on the day of the test.

Since the annual measurable objective — which sets the standard for AYP tests — will keep going up, Esary said the district is adjusting to keep pace. Standards will continue to rise under NCLB ahead of the 2013 date when 100 percent of schools are required to make adequate yearly progress.

In the Mat-Su Borough School District, new math and science curricula will greet students this school year, and teachers in charge of those subjects are in professional development preparing for the change.

All an individual school can do to remedy its AYP situation is target the groups that failed to meet the standard and figure out a way to help them, Wasilla High School Principal Dwight Probasco said.

For Probasco, who said Monday he had not yet reviewed his school’s individual results, making annual yearly progress is an ongoing battle.

“It’s a noble experiment,” Probasco said. “They raise the bar higher and we bust our butts with instructional techniques and remediation.”

Contact Michael Rovito at michael.rovito@frontiers- man.com or 352-2252.