No Child Left Behind: Methodological Challenges and Recommendations for Measuring Adequate Yearly Progress

Abstract

This paper dwells on the methodological challenges for student, school, district, and state accountability as formulated by the new law and provides some recommendations, based on recent research, for a viable approach for measuring progress of schools toward a set target. Conceived as a planning document, this paper aims to provide an analytic platform that will be transparent enough so that the discussion of the procedures for accountability measurement can be better de-coupled from the more contentious policy side of the current school accountability debate. It outlines the principal rationale for (1) employing scale scores, (2) using multiple outcomes, (3) estimating value-added gains from student-level longitudinal performance data, (4) requiring model-based aggregation, (5) requiring model-based inference, and (6) keeping the black-box open in a viable accountability system. Within the same framework, it proposes a definition of what it means for a school to ‘make AYP’ under NCLB. It shows that this notion of AYP, termed ‘AYP-NCLB’, can be operationalized as a comparison at any point in time of a school's growth rate with a minimum growth required of that school if it is expected to be proficient by 2013-14. The same analysis yields the proportion of the students in a school who are ‘proficient’ each year, the primary interest of standards-referenced approaches to the assessment.

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