Word: grades
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...alternative to AYP? Most educators, Garris included, prefer a more flexible measure of student improvement known as the growth model. In this approach, schools track the progress of each student year to year. Success is defined by a certain amount of growth, even if the student isn't on grade level. So a child like that Blaine third-grader would be judged a success--and his teachers and school would get credit for his achievement. "The growth model," says O'Connell, "is a much more accurate portrayal of a school's performance...
...North Carolina, Tennessee, Florida, Arkansas and Delaware. The main sticking point, she says, is having a data-management system that can accurately track the performance of individual students statewide. Another sticking point, she says, is ensuring that growth doesn't replace the goal of moving kids up to grade level. "Growth models have to be within what I call the bright-line principles of the law, which is grade-level proficiency by 2014. Moving the goalposts is not what we are talking about...
...fourth-graders in Mississippi were rated proficient in reading--the highest percentage in the nation. But when Mississippi youngsters sat for the rigorous NAEP--the closest thing to a national gold standard--they landed at the bottom: just 18% of fourth-graders made the grade in reading. States that have a tough curriculum and correspondingly tough exams--such as California and Massachusetts--are delivering a more rigorous education, but they're setting themselves up to fail in NCLB's terms...
...wonder so many states have watered down their expectations. An analysis by researchers at the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, a Washington-based nonprofit, found that the quality of educational standards--which are detailed, grade-by-grade, subject-by-subject learning goals--declined in 30 states from 2000 to 2006. That includes the four states--Delaware, Kansas, North Carolina and Oklahoma--said to be on track for 2014. Overall, only three states earned an A from Fordham on curriculum standards--which are also the basis for state tests; 37 rated C-- or below...
...love to point to schools that have reversed a long record of failure. Not far from Blaine, in a crime-infested part of town, sits M. Hall Stanton Elementary, everybody's favorite Philadelphia story. In 2002, only 12% of Stanton's fifth-graders were reading at grade level, and the third- and fourth-graders were engaged in what teachers called "gang wars." By 2006, 70% of fifth-graders were proficient readers, and the school was a model of decorum and learning, hitting its AYP goals three years in a row without sacrificing art, music or social studies--an achievement that...