How is Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) different from the states definition of growth?
Although it uses the word “Progress”, AYP is really a performance standard, not a growth standard. It is based only on the percentage of students who score at or above a certain level each year in a school, regardless of whether those students are the same students from one year to the next. The state’s growth standards, however, are based on the progress made by individual students from one year to the next. Although schools with high numbers of students who are “below grade level” have as good of a chance as any other school at meeting the state’s growth standards, those schools have a much harder time making AYP, often because many of their students come to them already behind where they should be academically.
