WCPSS Releases Preliminary 2006-07 AYP Results

August  17, 2007 - The Wake County Public School System today released the preliminary results for Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) under the federal "No Child Left Behind Law" (NCLB) for elementary and middle schools.  For the 2006-07 school year, 52 out of 121 elementary and middle schools in WCPSS met the AYP standard.

The standard requires that all subgroups in the school make their AYP target.  In order to get credit for the target, at least 76.7% of students in each subgroup must score proficient on End-of-Grade tests in Reading, and 65.8% must score proficient in Mathematics. In 2005-06, 55 of the 116 elementary and middle schools in WCPSS reached the goal of meeting all their targets.  The N.C. Department of Public Instruction is still resolving data issues for WCPSS high schools and alternative schools for 2006-07.

“AYP is one way that teaching and learning is measured in schools. Our students and their families have been hard at work on the learning part and our teachers and principals have been hard at work on the teaching part, so that every student and every group of students in our schools are successful,” said WCPSS Superintendent Del Burns. “We will use this testing data to improve our practices and meet students’ needs.”

The two Title I schools in school improvement last year, Hodge Road and Powell elementary schools, both met AYP in 2006-07. By meeting AYP for two consecutive years, Hodge Road is no longer identified for school improvement. Powell needs to make AYP again next year to get out of school improvement.

If a Title I school does not make AYP for two years in a row in the same subject, the school enters school improvement status. At that point the school must offer all students the option to transfer to another school.  Seven Title I elementary schools – Brentwood, Fuller, Harris Creek, Wendell, York, Durant Road, and Wilburn - will enter school improvement for the first time in 2007-08 year based on their AYP results.  Green and Millbrook elementary schools had also been anticipated to enter school improvement in 2007-08 based on early results in July, but both schools now appear to have made AYP based on the N. C. Department of Public Instruction’s final analysis. 

Analyses of the state's End-of-Grade and End-of-Course tests are used in both the NCLB's Adequate Yearly Progress and the state's ABCs of Public Education, but each standard looks at the data in different ways. Adequate Yearly Progress measures subgroups of students against a fixed performance standard for all students. The ABCs of Public Education measures academic growth of students over the course of a year.

The AYP passing rate targets apply to defined student subgroups. In order to qualify as a subgroup, there must be at least 40 students in the school identified under one of nine separate categories: White, Black, Hispanic, Native American, Asian/Pacific Islander, Multiracial, Limited English Proficiency, Economically Disadvantaged and Students with Disabilities. The school itself must also meet the target as a whole in order to meet the goal, and they must test at least 95% of their students in each of those defined subgroups.

Schools must meet every target with every identified subgroup in order to make AYP.  In addition to the 52 WCPSS elementary and middle schools that made all of their targets in 2006-07, 19 missed one AYP target, and 18 schools missed two.  Since 2002-03, the first year that AYP results were reported by the N.C. Department of Public Instruction, the average number of AYP targets that WCPSS elementary and middle schools have had to meet in order to make AYP has risen from 20 to 22.

Schools were much more likely to miss targets in Mathematics than in Reading, in part due to more difficult Mathematics tests implemented by the N.C. Department of Public Instruction in 2005-06.  New Reading tests will be implemented by the N.C. Department of Public Instruction in grades 3 through 8 in 2007-08.

Today's AYP results are considered preliminary and will not be official until the State Board of Education meeting the first week in September.  Results for WCPSS high schools will also be finalized by then.

You may find school-by-school AYP results at http://www.wcpss.net/test-scores/ayp/. For additional information, please contact N.C. Department of Public Instruction at 919-807-3300 or visit www.ncpublicschools.org.

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