Why haven’t efforts thus far improved academic achievement at western cluster schools?
Schools in the western cluster have shown some improvement over time. However, the amount of sustained academic achievement improvement has not been sufficient to remove schools from the “school improvement” category. New standards under NCLB require higher academic performance and AYP calculations are now determined by the performance of disaggregated subgroups, not just the average student performance. Efforts in the past have not considered the total performance of the entire cluster, feeder schools in relationship to the secondary schools or have not been coordinated to identify systematic goals and improvement strategies. The standards for the next years (2005-2014) are ever increasing. Current efforts will not be sufficient. By 2014, ALL students must be achieving at proficient levels. The measure of AYP will be increased annually between now and 2014.
