Only eight out of eighteen School District of Lancaster schools achieved adequate yearly progress (AYP) in 2009. AYP is a federal standard set by the Bush-era No Child Left Behind Act, and may well become obsolete under a re-write of No Child law proposed by President Barack Obama. And the chair of the SDoL board’s student achievement committee, Richard Caplan, is already asking that the district begin looking for growth outside of the AYP framework.
Caplan is a recently elected member of the board, bringing past experience as an attorney and a former member of the Ephrata Area School Board.
“Unfortunately,” Caplan said at the Tuesday, March 16, School Board meeting, “right now, the most objective measure that gets into the paper—and usually when its too late to do anything about it—is whether your make AYP or not.” Caplan noted that “it’s easy for the public to assume that, if schools don’t make AYP, then the administration is failing and that the board, therefore, is not doing its job….That’s not a lock-step kind of judgment.”
Caplan asserted that, without assessing a “very complex set of data, it’s very difficult to measure the success of the school system as a whole.”
Citing recently compiled administration data on academic progress from September to December, Caplan asserted, “Some of the schools are doing remarkably well.”
For example, according to the administration’s findings,
- Wickersham Elementary saw a 31.8% improvement in reading
- Ross Elementary experienced a 22.5% improvement in reading
- Carter and MacRae saw 22.8% growth in reading performance
- In mathematics, Wickersham had a 59% increase in performance
- Martin and Lafayette saw a 31% increase in math
- Hamilton saw a 31.7% improvement in math performance
“We as a board are going to be making sure that the administration and the teachers and all of the stakeholders are doing what we believe as a board to be best practices, to use resources efficiently to achieve incredible results,” Caplan said, while maintaining that “we do not expect complete success if you measure success by AYP. But we believe that this data demonstrates remarkable growth in the school system.”
“Even if its not AYP,” Caplan argued, “We can find other measures which are more realistic and fair, and achieve those goals that we set for ourselves—or that the Department of Educaiton here in Pennsylvania sets for us.”
Also in his committee report, Caplan recommended that the board consider changing the title of the “student achievement” committee to “educational excellence”—“ which I believe is what the mission of the board should be about,” he asserted.
