More Utah schools meet No Child Left Behind goals

Over bagels and orange juice, teachers at Hillsdale Elementary School in West Valley City learned the good news Tuesday morning.

"We made AYP!" Principal Yvonne Pearson shouted as she unfurled a congratulatory banner and teachers cheered. "I want to say thank you so much."

Like Hillsdale, 87 percent of Utah schools made Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) toward the goals of No Child Left Behind (NCLB), a federal education law, the Utah Office of Education announced Wednesday. That's up from 80 percent of Utah schools the year before. To make AYP each year, schools must make sure certain percentages of their students test on-grade level in math and reading in each of many ethnic, ability and income groups, and that certain

percentages of students take state tests. The idea behind NCLB is that those percentages must increase over time until 100 percent of students test on-grade level in 2014.

Schools that don't meet yearly goals but accept federal money for serving low-income students face sanctions such as having to bus students to better-performing schools or replacing staff. This year, however, only 12 Utah schools face sanctions compared with 15 last year, and none face the most severe sanctions.

"That just shows how hard schools are working and what they're accomplishing," said Judy Park, state associate superintendent.

More Utah schools this year made AYP despite -- or maybe because of -- different targets. In order to make AYP this year, more students had to test on-grade level in language arts than the year before. But the state, with federal permission, actually lowered math goals this year to give schools wiggle room to deal with a new state math curriculum and new math test.

Clyde Mason, director of accountability and program services for the Jordan School District, called lowering the math goals "reasonable." This year, 37 of the district's 47 schools made AYP, compared with 24 the year before.

"It obviously was a significant factor," Mason said of the lower math goals.

In the Canyons School District, 88 percent of schools made AYP this year compared with 65 percent the year before.

The lower math targets "did play a big role in this year's AYP," said Jennifer Toomer-Cook, spokeswoman for the Canyons School District.

Park said Wednesday it was too early to say how big a difference the new goals might have made.

Still, schools across the state largely celebrated this week.

East Midvale Elementary School, for example, held a picnic party late last week to celebrate making AYP this year after failing to make it the year before. Principal Sally Sansom said the school improved by using such strategies as professional learning communities, where teams of teachers met once a week to discuss data and children who needed help. Students were also given regular assessments to make sure they were on track to meet goals.

Richard Mellor, a sixth-grade teacher at East Midvale, said he feels a sense of accomplishment as an educator.

"It's definitely not a fluke," Mellor said. "It's the result of hard work."

Meanwhile, in the eastern part of the state, at least one school is celebrating a "monumental" victory, said Jeff Morris, assistant principal at Eagle View Elementary School in Roosevelt.

Some considered Eagle View Elementary, which replaced West Middle School, to be the worst school in the state.

West, which sat near the heart of the Uintah and Ouray Indian Reservation, failed to make AYP for seven years and was the first and, so far, only school in the state to close and be restructured under NCLB.

But this year, Eagle View Elementary made AYP. The school did that by replacing or reassigning about two-thirds of the staff and moving the entire K-8 school onto an elementary schedule, meaning students in all grades spend most of the day in one classroom with one teacher. Also, the Ute Indian Tribe created and enforced a new truancy policy.

"A lot of people came together with the same vision to make things better," said Principal Robert Stearmer. "These are children that if you have faith in them, they can do it."

Stearmer said he doesn't agree with all of NCLB, but it held the school accountable. "When you finally want to get change done, sometimes you have to create a sense of urgency in people and that's what No Child Left Behind did," he said.

Though Utah officials have long decried NCLB, parents and educators across the state expressed mixed feelings about the law this week as their schools' performances went public.

Many dislike the way schools must meet goals in each of 40 categories to pass. If a school fails to meet a goal in any one of the categories, the school fails to make AYP. Statewide, more than 40 percent of elementary and high schools that failed to make AYP missed it by only one of the 40 categories, according to state education officials.

Clearfield High School was among those schools that only narrowly missed making AYP. Clearfield parent Jennifer Record, however, said AYP results don't change her opinion of her child's school.

"I don't think it's a true gauge of if that's a good school or not," Record said. "Parents need to get into the schools and find out what programs they are doing."

Many educators say they would like to see NCLB seriously revised.

"I'm fine with monitoring progress and being monitored as teachers, but let's be realistic," said Laurie Erney, a special education teacher at Hillsdale.

Though the law was implemented by former President George W. Bush and has been up for reauthorization, President Barack Obama is showing no signs of scrapping it. But that's just fine with some educators who say it has forced them to focus more heavily on data and individual students from different ethnic and economic backgrounds.

"When we didn't pass AYP, it wasn't this big punishment where people were going to come in and change everything," said Mellor at East Midvale. "It's just that people went out of their way to make sure more resources were available to us."

Lisa Wells, a third-grade teacher at Hillsdale, said making AYP this year validated all the work her school had done over the past year. At Hillsdale, 70 percent of students are learning English and 77 percent come from low-income families.

On a recent school day, she asked her third graders to give her examples of proper nouns.

"Christmas," one student answered.

"Navidad," answered another, giving her the Spanish word for the holiday. She then asked the student to tell her what the word meant in English.

"We've changed the way we teach," Wells said.