Maine schools are destined to struggle with Adequate Yearly Progress status.

In late September, the headlines of several Maine newspapers had some sobering education news. Those headlines related to the release of the state Department of Education’s 2005 Adequate Yearly Progress scores for the No Child Left Behind Act.

The headline from the Kennebec Journal article read, “One in five Maine schools falls short,” while for the Sun Journal it was “148 Maine schools fail to make the grade.” Subheadings in other papers gave an even more troubling figure for some readers. Apparently, the number of Maine schools failing to make Adequate Yearly Progress grew for the third year in a row.

As community members read these reports, there are a number of aspects regarding the Adequate Yearly Progress calculations that need to be emphasized. The most important, of course, is whether a school appears on the failure list.

First, most people are not aware that an appearance on the list is directly related to the size of the school being tested. For that reason, one will see a preponderance of middle school and high schools on the list, especially when considered as a percentage of schools.

A simple check of our area schools and their respective data confirms that fact. Consider the following simple example from SAD 52. Our district consists of three towns with separate elementary schools, with students coming together to attend one middle and high school. All of our elementary schools made AYP, but both the middle and high school were placed on the failure lists.

One of the elementary schools in our district is typical by Maine standards in that it is quite small. The school’s fourth-grade population met the state standard for AYP, or so it seems.

In actuality, that statement is misleading. An appearance on the failure list comes about when either an entire school population fails to make a particular benchmark, or if any one of several subgroups fails to make the cutoff. In the particular school noted, the number of students in each sub-group was statistically too small to be measured.

So that elementary school had to meet just four cutoff points to make AYP, or, more accurately, avoid the failure list. The school had to test 95 percent of its students in reading and 95 percent in mathematics, and the entire student population in the fourth grade as a whole had to meet the standard cutoff point for both reading and mathematics.

However, in our district, the middle school has a far greater student population. For the eighth-graders at Tripp Middle School, the number of checkpoints moved to a total of 10 as the school had a combined number of students that led to having three sub-groups scored along with the whole school and the 95 percent test-taking criteria. Unfortunately, the special education population failed to meet the math standard. On the positive side, the school hit each of the other requisite checkpoints, meaning that the students met nine of the 10 criteria necessary.

But that one low test score put the middle school on the list of 148 failing schools. Therefore, our middle school failed to make AYP, while our elementary school was deemed to make AYP because it was so small it could not be scored in the same category.

A second, and just as critical, aspect for our public to understand is the benchmarks that Maine has chosen for its students are incredibly high. Even though a state could set any relative standard for AYP purposes, Maine continued to use the standards it had set forth during the early stages of the Learning Results implementation. These are reported to be amongst the highest in the country, meaning that a school making the failure list for Maine might easily have reached a passing mark in other states.

Perhaps the simplest example of this is the proposed change to use the Scholastic Assessment Test, the infamous SAT, to replace the Maine Educational Assessment Tests at 11th grade. Reportedly, the alignment between the SAT and Maine standards will allow the SAT to replace the existing MEAs.

Most people who have gone on to college remember taking the SAT very well. Talk to those people, and they will tell you that the test was one of the most taxing they have ever taken. In fact, many would categorize the experience as one of the most humbling moments in their academic careers.

Yet Maine is set to move forward, using this test as its basis for determining student progress and for making AYP under NCLB. Many educators cringe at the thought of the average special education student sitting for these incredibly difficult tests, or how likely it will be for poorly motivated students to make even a modest effort toward completing the exams, if they decide to attend the test session at all.

The number of Maine schools on the failure list has climbed each year under the NCLB reporting, from 118 in 2003 to 132 a year ago to 148 in 2005. That apparently disappointing fact masks many aspects of the school accountability movement as well as whether or not schools are, indeed, progressing.

Even though only 21 percent of Maine’s schools failed to meet the Adequate Yearly Progress criteria, the individual reports sent to many school districts revealed that when the state was taken as a whole, Maine students collectively failed to meet Adequate Yearly Progress in virtually all categories. When taken as a whole, Maine students were able to attain AYP in only one test category, 4th-grade math.

Despite the shortcomings in the tests and the data, Maine schools are working diligently to respond to the accountability movement sweeping education. However, in fairness to all teachers in the state of Maine, it is important that the public understand the statistical challenges large schools face with making AYP, to say nothing of the challenges our students face with meeting the rigor we have set forth.

Thomas J. Hanson is the superintendent of schools for SAD 52.