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For the most part, districts can only meet AYP if their schools meet AYP. Consequently, district leadership needs to keep a sharp focus on the student achievement targets, set clear expectations for all schools, build the capacity of instructional leaders to monitor student progress, and hold all schools accountable for knowing where their students are in relation to the content standards and for creating appropriate interventions for students and schools not succeeding.
Districts must hold schools accountable for knowing where their students are on the content standard indicators. As intuitive as this may be, it is not common practice in most classrooms, and schools cannot make good instructional decisions without knowing where their students are. Exhorting schools to improve student achievement in the absence of technical assistance rarely works. Consequently, school districts need to plan for an ongoing discussion about what students are expected to know and do, what evidence of learning teachers and schools have collected and analyzed, how teachers have used the data to inform instruction, and what progress is being made based on instructional interventions. Schools will need explicit expectations and professional development on how to diagnose what their students know and how to monitor student progress.
When the targets are clear, using data-driven decision making underpins improving student achievement. The district will need to model how data drives their decisions and expect schools to do the same. They need to determine what are the critical data to analyze when determining progress and next steps.
It is possible for a district to meet AYP in the aggregate even though some of their schools fail to meet AYP. Imagine that only one school fails and all others succeed. Averaging across all schools may result in sufficient numbers of students achieving proficiency in the aggregate at the district level. However, counting on high performing schools balancing out the impact of low performing schools is a short sighted strategy that will not only fail to meet the needs of children in the short term, but is doomed to failure in the long run.
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