AYP As We Know It Is Over – Alabama’s Waiver Part 1

[Click here to view as a printable PDF] This is Part 1 of a three-part series. Part 2 is here. Part 3 is here (added links 3/9/14).

The ALSDE announced on Friday that the U.S. Department of Education (USDOE) has granted its ESEA Flexibility Waiver Request (the “waiver”). This waiver is big news for Alabama, the 38th state to receive a waiver. It means that State Superintendent Dr. Tommy Bice’s Plan 2020 is moving full steam ahead.

States have been given the opportunity to seek waivers from the accountability provisions under No Child Left Behind—which we fondly refer to as Adequate Yearly Progress, or AYP—in exchange for making new promises and regulations for schools to follow to improve student achievement.

States seeking waivers have to adhere to three principles: (1) College- and Career-Ready expectations for all students, (2) State-developed differentiated recognition, accountability, and support, and (3) Supporting effective instruction and leadership. This post will focus on Principle 2, related to accountability changes in the waiver.

For Your Review

While more detail has been added since the original waiver request submission in September 2012, the nuts and bolts of it remain the same. As such, here are four posts you can review for background:

• If Not AYP to Measure Progress, Then What?? Alabama’s ESEA Waiver Request – this is a good primer to understand what the waiver was about

• Alabama’s ESEA Flexibility Waiver Request Released for Public Comment – The ALSDE’s link to the original document is no longer valid, but it can be found here.
• Different Performance Expectations for Different Children? Say What?– Again, links have changed. Here’s the original “Attachment 27” referred to in the post.
• Race-Based Performance Targets – It’s Happening Here in Alabama, Too – this was written in response to an NBC Nightly News segment questioning whether race-based performance targets were reasonable

So Much Is Changing for Accountability

Revamping AYP was no easy task. In exchange for AYP, the ALSDE had to determine how else student achievement can be measured and schools and districts can be held accountable. That’s where Plan 2020 came in: it provided the vision to create what is hoped to be a meaningful method to hold schools and districts accountable for student achievement.

There are so many changes included in this waiver, that it’s going to require more than one post to bring all of them to you. The waiver itself went from 75 to 110 pages and from 27 to 36 Attachments, apparently after a couple of visits from the USDOE.

This post will cover these five areas of the waiver, all associated with accountability (principle 2):

1. Annual Measurable Objectives (AMOs) – the benchmarks used to determine achievement levels
2. Graduation Rates
3. Change in the minimum number of students (“n-size”) needed for a group’s achievement to matter
4. Local Annual Report Cards
5. Overall promise of improved accountability

The waiver has four other new areas related to accountability to understand, including:

• the School/District Performance Index,
• how achievement gaps are calculated,
• what the plans are for Reward Schools, Priority Schools, Priority Districts, and Focus Schools
• the school grading system

Those four areas will be covered in two subsequent posts. If you just can’t wait, feel free to comb through the waiver for yourself.

Annual Measurable Objectives (AMOs)

The first thing that jumped out at me in reviewing the approved waiver was the way the Annual Measurable Objectives (AMOs) have been revised.  AMOs are the percentage of students expected to score at Level 3 or 4 on the Alabama Reading and Mathematics Test (ARMT) in any given year.

“AMOs will increase in annual equal increments toward a goal of reducing by half the percentage of students in the ‘all students’ group and in each ESEA subgroup that is not proficient within six years,” according to the waiver.

The revised AMOs are broken down by grade, subject and subgroup, whereas the original submission from last September was only broken down by subject and subgroup.

Here’s what the original AMOs from September 2012 looked like.

While it was disturbing to learn that AMOs now vary by race, ethnicity, socioeconomic, disability, and English-language learner status, what was most disturbing was the exceedingly low AMOs originally set for children with disabilities and those learning the English language, 15% and 16%, respectfully.

Fortunately, the USDOE must have had concerns as well, and thus the AMOs were revised upward.  The lowest AMOs now are around 42% (for 8th grade reading) for children with disabilities and English language learners expected for this year’s testing, rising to 68% by 2018.

NOTE: Realize that what that means is that less than half of children with disabilities and English-language learners are currently expected to score a Level 3 or 4 on the ARMT, and that only two-thirds will be expected to do so by 2018. [Really struggling with this one.]

AMOs will be re-established in the fall of 2013 for the high school span of grades due to the use of the End-of-Course (EOC) tests for Algebra I and English 10. Apparently that is now the bar: how many students can pass Algebra I and English 10. [Struggling with this one, too.]

The AMOs for Grades 3 through 8 will be re-established by the fall of 2014, after the ACT Aspire tests are given in the spring of 2014.  You may recall that Alabama is the first state to adopt the ACT Aspire series to test student achievement. [I’m going for the antacids here in a moment.]

AMOs will be calculated for each school and district as well as for the whole state. No indication as to when those school- and district-specific AMOs will be released.

Graduation Rates Have Been Revised, Too 

The original graduation rates were very low for students with disabilities and English-language learners, and they, too, have been revised upward in the final approved request.  Graduation rates “will increase in annual equal increments toward a goal of reducing by half the percentage of students in the ‘all students’ group and in each subgroup who are not proficient within six years.”

Here are the graduation rates submitted last September. Here are the approved graduation rates.

The Good News about When Students Actually Matter

Under the old AYP system, there had to be at least 40 students in a group in order for their annual achievement to matter enough to report, and thus for schools to be held accountable for their progress or lack thereof. For students with disabilities, this led to very few schools being held accountable in any way under the old AYP method for their achievement, as many schools did not have 40 or more students in special education. For example, even at the school district level, only 26 of Alabama’s 132 school systems had more than 40 students in special education and thus were held accountable for those students’ achievement in 2011.

Under the new accountability system, that minimum number of students has been lowered from 40 to 20. But before you get too excited, know that the way that the achievement gap is calculated is going to confound this somewhat. The gap calculation is for the next post.

Local Annual Reports Cards Are Back

Happily, after years of no local report cards, the waiver request states that LEAs (that’s Local Education Agencies, or school districts) “will report annually….on their local report cards, for the ‘all students’ group and for each subgroup: information on student achievement at each proficiency level; data comparing actual achievement levels to the State’s annual measurable objectives; the percentage of students not tested; performance on the other academic indicator for elementary and middle schools; and graduation rates for high schools.”

That’s really good news. Cause right now, this is what you get. All accountability data is combined at the state level, and you have to hunt and peck through the “accountability reporting system”, two years at a time, one grade level and subject at a time, and make your own notes in order to get an understanding of where your local school district is in terms of student achievement.

The bad news is that these report cards won’t be available until the fall/winter of 2015/2016. So I guess we have two more years of not having a clue.

The report card that will be produced will most likely be based on the  A-F method prescribed by the law passed in 2012. What remains to be answered is why the grading system won’t be utilized until 2016, as the law clearly intended the grading system to be ready for the 2013-2014 year.

Overall Improvement in Accountability Is Promised

In the waiver, the ALSDE promises to improve overall accountability. [Holding my breath.] From the waiver:

The new state accountability system will prompt all stakeholders to ask difficult questions about increasing academic achievement and raising instructional quality within Alabama’s schools. An Accountability Delivery Plan will be developed that focuses on the implementation of the new ESEA Flexibility that will include the following:

1. Recognizing and embracing “collective ownership of the problems/struggles/achievements of public schools” by entire communities.
2. Increasing the transparency of the accountability system so that all stakeholders have access to and an understanding of the metrics utilized to measure system, school, and student success.
3. Creating professional development opportunities for teachers and leaders aligned with and descriptive of the new accountability system.

The Rest of the Accountability Stuff

The other four areas will be covered next:

• the School/District Performance Index,
• how the achievement gaps are calculated,
• what the plans are for Reward Schools, Priority Schools, Priority Districts, and Focus Schools
• the school grading system

Then an attempt will be made to make simple sense out of all of this. Stay tuned.