User's Guide: Special to the Web
School Targets for Adequate Yearly Progress

Negotiated achievement targets for adequate
yearly progress towards all students reaching state standards

What you are looking at
The first two bars in each of the tests represent the school's actual level of proficiency against the school's target for increased proficiency in three years. The second two bars represent the actual percentage of students achieving at the lowest levels of non-proficiency against the school's target for decreasing the percentage of these students in three years.

What you are looking for
Until there is enough achievement data to show a trend (see below for explanation), the only thing to look for is the level of challenge a school has set for itself.

Defining progress
Rhode Island's educational policies proceed from a commitment that all students will reach the Regents' Standard of Proficiency in essential areas. According to this criterion, state assessment results demonstrate that every school in Rhode Island needs improvement. No school has every student reaching every standard. Consequently, all schools need to focus their efforts on improving teaching and learning. Setting achievement targets is a way of tracking a school's focus and efforts. In time, targets will show parents and the community how to assess the success of a school's improvement efforts.

Creating the first data points for achievement trends
We are fortunate to be able to study other states' experience with setting progress targets and handling rewards and sanctions that go with them. Perhaps the most important lesson is that a single year of data can woefully misrepresent the movement a school is making towards 100% proficiency. A particularly exemplary or challenged class can skew the results and either inflate or deflate the real achievements of the school as a whole. Therefore, for most tests the 1998 achievement data is only the first of the three years that will be counted towards a three-year rolling average. Three years of achievement data averaged together will create a point, a specific level of achievement that can be followed each year henceforth with three-year averaged points that will show trend lines, or the progress schools are making towards achieving higher proficiency rates among their students. At that point the trend lines can be measured against the targets schools have set for themselves.

Two kinds of targets

Target #1: Increasing the
percentage of students at or above standard
Schools were asked to consider the proportion of their students who are currently proficient in the selected test areas and commit to increasing that proportion within the guidelines of 3 to 5% a year. That number was multiplied by three to obtain a three-year target for the year 2001, a number that should fall within 9 to 15%. Again, the three-year target-setting exercise will give schools a chance to accommodate the especially high- or low-performing individual class.

Target #2: Reducing the
percentage of students at the lowest performance level
Schools used the same 3 to 5% guidelines to set targets to reduce the proportion of their lowest achieving students. Some schools have a large number of students performing at the lowest level, or "Little Evidence of Achievement." Those schools merely applied the guide numbers to that group. If there were less than 10% at this level, the school added the percentage of students at the next lowest level, or "Below the Standard." Those schools applied the guide numbers to the combined lowest two achievement levels. In rare cases, schools had less than 10% of their student population in the two lowest categories combined. Some of these schools used all three groups of students performing below the standard to set a target, and in these few cases the two target numbers are merely inverses of one another.

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