Consequences of AYP don't add up for state

As schools in Clovis and New Mexico plow toward serious consequences for failing to meet federal academic standards, at least one appears less and less realistic.

The state has neither the resources nor the will to assume management of public schools who repeatedly fail the No Child Left Behind standards for math and reading performance, officials said. Taking over a school is the stiffest of five possible actions.

More than half of the 828 public schools in the state missed Adequate Yearly Progress standards for 2005-2006, according to the New Mexico Public Education Department, including six in Clovis.

“I don’t think the state has any interest in taking over 400 schools,” Clovis Municipal Schools Superintendent Rhonda Seidenwurm said.

Clovis schools has failed to meet the standard three straight years.

“For public education to have the staff to take over that many schools doesn’t seem reasonable or rational. My guess is the New Mexico Public Education Department does not have the silver bullet — where they can take over a school and make it better than it is,” said the executive director of the New Mexico School Boards Association, Mack Mitchell.

Clovis High, Lockwood Elementary, Cameo Elementary, and all three of the district’s middle schools — Yucca, Gattis, and Marshall, fell short of federal testing marks designed to have 100 percent of students proficient in math and reading by the 2013-14 school year.

Because they have failed AYP for two or more years in a row for the same reason, they have been labeled in need of improvement, and have been placed in various stages of the No Child Left Behind School Improvement Framework. Once in the framework, consequences for continuing to miss AYP grow stiffer and stiffer.

Those schools, however, won’t find themselves suddenly buzzing with an entirely new staff or an overload of state officials, according to an official with the New Mexico Public Education Department.

“Sometimes people think when we say ‘take over’ it means we will bring in a whole new staff. What it truly means is we will be prescribing instructional programming and leadership at the school,” said Catherine Cross Maple, deputy secretary of the New Mexico Department of Education.

The schools in Clovis that failed AYP did so as a result of the performance a subgroup or subgroups of students. Schools with not enough students to constitute subgroups have a much better chance of making AYP, local educators maintain.

Texico, Grady and Fort Sumner easily made AYP this year.

Critics of the law say standards for English Language Learners and special education subgroups are simply unrealistic.

“In some instances, we are asking special education kids to do things they are not capable of doing,” Mitchell said.

The federal system, Mitchell said, is “dragging a lot of good schools down with weak schools.”

Previous data shows the widest AYP achievement gap in the state is among special education students, Cross Maple said. But there are schools in which that subgroup and others perform to standard, she said.

Cross Maple declined to discuss specific reasons those schools are doing well because she said she didn’t have the necessary data handy.

In schools where the performance of a subgroup of students is the only area where the school is shown to be lagging, specific programs, in lieu of sweeping changes, would be implemented to bring those students up to par, Cross Maple said.

“I don’t see us lowering our (AYP) expectations soon, because our expectations are where they should be,” Cross Maple said.

Her sentiments are mirrored at the federal level.

“Just because a school does not make AYP does not mean it is a bad school. It means there are areas where the school needs to improve. If one of the subgroups didn’t make AYP, more attention needs to be place on that certain subgroup,” said Jo Ann Webb, a spokesperson for U.S. Department of Education.

Rather than continuing to toss schools into the No Child Left Behind framework for improvement, many are crying for reform.

The program is due to re-authorization by Congress in 2007, according to Sen. Gay Kernan, R-Hobbs, an advocate of reform.

“There is a general awareness that we are in a very competitive world and we must make sure our graduates can compete,” said Rep. Steve Pearce, R-N.M., who supports No Child Left Behind, but believes measures for the performance of special education and ELL students need to be adjusted.

“In New Mexico, there are many people who say the initial bar (for AYP performance) was set very, very high so it caused continuing problems for us,” he said.