Individual Student Improvement Should Trump All Else

I am going to take more than my customary amount of space to respond to your letter because I think you have put your finger on a problem that bothers parents and teachers throughout the Washington area. The Washington Post has been reporting that many schools failed to make adequate yearly progress last year. It is particularly troublesome when that happens at the school your children attend or where you teach.

I think a parent should focus on how the child is doing, not how the school is doing. I think a teacher should focus, as you have done, on how the students are doing, not how the school is doing. If parents find their children have improved significantly in achievement over the previous year, and if teachers find their students, such as yours, have done the same, then I think it is a waste of time to fret over your school not making AYP.

Schools with many low-income children -- in your school they account for 83 percent of the student body -- will find it much more difficult to reach AYP than schools that have mostly middle-class children, even when those low-income kids are improving impressively. They start from a lower point, which makes it harder to reach an overall target for a whole state or school district.

As any suburban principal will tell you, the law also has little booby traps that can lead you to miss AYP even if nearly every child in the school is doing well.

I have argued for a long time that the No Child Left Behind law is a mess but better than any possible alternatives. In that way, it is just like democracy.

That is a fitting comparison because the worst parts of the law, such as the notion that all children can be proficient in reading and math by 2014, are the result of its being written by democratically elected politicians. Very smart legislators in both the Republican and the Democratic parties have explained to me that it would have been politically disastrous to write a bill that said only 60, 70 or even 80 percent of children had to be proficient by 2014, because in the next election their opponents would have run TV spots that said, "Do we want a member of Congress who voted to leave 20 percent of our kids behind?"

So the law forces us to move toward an impossible goal. So what? As you point out, at least we are moving forward. Now, we have to urge the legislators to rewrite that law so that it judges schools more on the year-to-year improvement of each child, rather than meeting an annual target.

You have given me the data on last year's AIM fifth-graders. I looked up the results for last year's sixth-graders, including your 2005-06 fifth-graders, who also improved a great deal.

On the D.C. test, that class went from 38 percent proficient in fifth grade to 49 percent proficient in sixth grade in reading and from 32 percent to 78 percent in math.

That is something to brag about, not worry about. If your child, or the children in your class, are showing such gains, you can ignore AYP and wait for Congress to fix the law so we can see more clearly what great teachers like you are doing.

Please send your questions, along with your name, e-mail or postal address and telephone number, to Extra Credit, The Washington Post, 526 King St., Suite 515, Alexandria, Va. 22314. Or e-mailextracredit@washpost.com.