No one disagrees that the basic concept is admirable: Expect all children to learn, and hold schools accountable if they don't.

But the widespread confusion and disappointment following the first year of President Bush's sweeping education reform, the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, has left Missouri educators facing some tough realities.

More than half of Missouri schools, including 18 in Southeast Missouri, didn't make adequate yearly progress -- being shortened to AYP -- on this year's state assessments as required by NCLB. Meanwhile, neighboring states such as Illinois and Arkansas had significantly fewer schools, just 15 to 20 percent, not make AYP.

But Missouri educators say it's not because their schools aren't doing as good a job as those in other states. They blame the state's annual assessment -- the Missouri Assessment Program -- and the standards set by the state board of education.

"As you look around the state, we're all struggling with the same things," said Mark Bowles, Cape Girardeau School District superintendent. "There are problems in this test that still have not been addressed, and I find it hard for our state to have said we're going to hold you accountable for a test we know is flawed."

Not all agree. Some national organizations say the most important issue that comes out of AYP shouldn't be how the states' standards stack up against each other.

"It's taking your eye off the ball a little bit to say we're doing worse because our standards are higher," said Joseph Garcia, director of public leadership with Achieve Inc. "It's not a bad thing to have high expectations."

Achieve, a Washington, D.C.-based, bipartisan organization that works with states to raise standards and improve student performance, formed in 1996.

Since then, the group has worked with 16 states to improve their standards and accountability systems. Although Missouri wasn't one of them, Garcia said Missouri's standards are there for a reason.

"The people of Missouri have spoken. They've said this is what our kids should know and be able to do," Garcia said. "What AYP is telling us is that in these schools, kids aren't learning that stuff."

Officials with Education Trust, a nonprofit student achievement advocacy group, claim individual test standards have nothing to do with the number of schools in each state that didn't make AYP this year.

"The rigor of state standards does not explain why Missouri's AYP list was much longer than other states," said Ross Wiener, policy director with Education Trust.

Instead, Wiener said the AYP list variation from state to state is tied to the size and distribution of achievement gaps within the state, as well as the number of students who did not take or satisfactorily complete the test.

Under NCLB, schools must have 95 percent of students take the test or automatically fail to make AYP.

Missouri's high standard

In an attempt to explain why so many of Missouri's schools didn't meet the new requirements, groups like the Missouri School Boards Association have a different opinion.

In a recent memo to school superintendents, MSBA states that the high percentage of schools that did not make AYP this year "does not mean many of our schools are doing a poor job. It does mean our standards in Missouri are extremely high."

Brent Ghan, director of education policy, said MSBA believes the goals of NCLB are commendable, but changes need to be made to better reflect the accomplishments of schools.

"We're setting the bar awfully high in Missouri," said Ghan. "It's fine to understand that certain groups don't perform as well as others, but let's not label an entire school because of a few students."

Educators say that the MAP, which tests students in four core subject areas at various grade levels every spring, isn't graded objectively and has more difficult questions than other states' assessments.

"For one test, which takes maybe four hours, to completely evaluate what students have done all year long is absurd," said Diann Bradshaw, superintendent of the Scott City School District.

The MAP is divided into three types of questions: multiple choice; constructed response, which requires short answers; and performance events.

Essay questions

It's the performance events, which ask students to read something and then apply their knowledge by writing an essay, that bothers local school officials.

But other states, such as Arkansas and Indiana, also have performance events included in their state assessments.

In Arkansas, students in grades four through 11 take tests with open-response or short-answer questions in reading and math. They also answer two essay questions, which are scored for content, style, sentence formation, word usage, and mechanics.

An example of an open-response question from the eighth-grade science test in Arkansas is, "In your own words, describe what takes place before, during and after a volcanic eruption. Give a thorough description of the process."

Missouri's test has similarly worded questions. On the seventh-grade science test, for example, students are expected to "explain in detail what causes summer and winter in Missouri."

But it's the process in states such as Illinois, where students in third, fourth, seventh and eighth grades take the all-multiple-choice Illinois Standards Achievement test, that has Missouri educators calling foul.

"It makes a difference. You've got a good chance of guessing with multiple choice," said Fisher. "But it's more difficult when you have to apply your knowledge."

But educators' biggest complaint about MAP surrounds the state's definition of "proficiency."

Under NCLB, all schools must have 100 percent of students, regardless of learning disabilities, race or socioeconomic status, scoring at proficient or higher on annual state assessments by 2014.

Those that don't face sanctions such as paying for students to transfer to a better-performing school, offering tutoring services and even replacing staff or opening a charter school.

The sanctions only apply to schools that receive federal Title I funding. Locally, those schools are Blanchard, Franklin and Jefferson elementaries and Central Middle School in Cape Girardeau; Orchard and South elementaries and Jackson Middle School in Jackson; and the middle school in Scott City.

Each state designed its own assessment, defined "proficient" and set their own annual benchmark targets for making adequate yearly progress on the tests.

"If all 50 states can set their own proficient level, that tells you it's very subjective," said Dr. Rita Fisher, assistant superintendent in Jackson. "Grade level is just a perception here."

Missouri's academic standards, known as the Show-Me Standards, were developed in the mid-1990s by a group of educators, parents and policy makers as a result of the Outstanding Schools Act of 1993.

Those same standards were used to design the Missouri Assessment Program and its five performance levels: step one, progressing, nearing proficient, proficient and advanced.

In most states, students who score "proficient" on a state assessment are performing on grade level, successfully completing standards associated with their grade.

That isn't the case in Missouri.

While proficient and advanced are the desired performance levels in regard to AYP and the No Child Left Behind Act, nearing proficient is actually the level that indicates students are doing grade-level work in Missouri.

"When this evolved it was way ahead of some of the other things coming down the pipe," Anderson said. "If we'd gone back to the drawing board, maybe it would have made a difference."

But instead, state officials decided to keep Missouri's definition of proficiency in place, at least for the first years of No Child Left Behind.

"If something doesn't change, it means 100 percent of Missouri students must be scoring above grade level by 2014," said Dr. Bert Schulte, associate commissioner of education in Missouri.

The new MAP

Already though, state officials are gearing up for a new assessment, which will be necessary by 2006, when NCLB will require schools to administer tests at all grade levels.

Currently, in Missouri, various subjects of the MAP are only given to students in third, fourth, seventh, eighth, 10th and 11th grades. In three years, students in fifth, sixth and ninth grades will also be required to take the tests.

Schulte said the state will most likely rethink the performance level definitions for the new assessments.

But regardless of the current definitions or future changes, Education Trust officials stress that school officials should not use test standards as an excuse for not making AYP this year.

In an Education Trust policy brief released in September, Wiener explains that NCLB required each state to set its AYP baseline targets by ranking all schools based on the number of students who scored proficient or higher on the 2002 assessment scores.

Once the schools were ranked, state officials set the baseline target at the lowest 20 percent of scores.

Based on those figures, schools in Missouri had to have 19.4 percent of students scoring proficient or higher on the communication arts test and 9.3 percent of students scoring proficient or higher on the math test to make AYP on the spring 2003 MAP.

"For this year, AYP is just determining which schools are at the baseline," Wiener said. "In coming years, the difficulty of state tests will come into play."

Preliminary data shows that 1,033 of Missouri's 2,100 schools fell below the baseline target on the 2003 MAP. Among the majority of those schools, it wasn't because the student population as a whole didn't perform well.

Under NCLB, certain subgroups of students, based on race, learning disabilities, socioeconomic status and English language proficiency, must also make AYP.

"AYP is so hard because it doesn't take much, one or two kids in a subgroup, to change that," said Pat Fanger, director of curriculum and assessment in Cape Girardeau. "That's why we can't make any excuses. We have to have high expectations for all students."

cclark@semissourian.com

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