Please Note: Official DPI AYP Designation Has Not Been Assigned

Please be aware that my conclusions regarding district and building AYP status has not been confirmed by official DPI notification. However, as much as the DPI would like to make it seem like the layperson is incapable of understanding how to calculate AYP, anybody with a search engine, a calculator and a pure love for crunching numbers is more than qualified to do the math. I fall in this category.

I qualified the areas where I may be a bit shaky, which is in regard to the second level Safe Harbor AYP definition and the width of the typical Confidence Intervals for our district. Other than that, I completely understand how to arrive at AYP conclusions. One can even access computational websites online entitled "Adequate Yearly Progress Calculator" if you don't trust your own ability to add, subtract, multiply and divide. I got sick of punching numbers and wrote a mini-program in excel to do the SH2 calculations.

The district has a week or so to verify and qualify any data they are legally able to challenge before the DPI sends out the AYP notifications, at which point the DPI designation becomes official. I don't believe that disqualification of a few students at the Middle School will make any difference in their Reading AYP status. (I think I recall that only 2% of disabled students district wide may be disqualified from consideration in the AYP status calculations. I could be wrong on the exact value, but I know there is a very strict limitation here).

Some may criticize me for publicizing this before the DPI calls it official. I say, why wait when you know how to do the calculations? The city of Janesville was proud and trumpeted their news. The democrats were very anxious to show just how impotent the Milwaukee Voucher program results were and posted that data.

I have always been a take-charge kinda person. I propose that the DISTRICT should begin the process of determining the problems and proposing a solution. Scrutinize the data and listen carefully to what it tells you. Don't wait for the suits at the DPI to tell you that there is a problem. Find it, own it and solve it in a proactive way. I reiterate that my purpose in writing the AYP post was to illustrate the complete idiocy of the NCLB Act and how a committed district is negatively effected in many ways by the numerous intangible consequences of unfunded, scientifically invalid federal mandates.