Want New Accountability Measures? Here's Your Chance

If judging a school's effectiveness by its students' individual progress makes sense to you, you will welcome the Department of Education's recent expansion of the growth-model pilot program.

What it is: Under a growth model, a school is held accountable for increasing individual students' achievement from one school year to the next, instead of the current AYP measure that compares, for example, current fourth-graders' achievement to the previous year's group.

Act fast: Qualified states should submit their proposals to participate in the growth-model program by Feb. 1, 2008. Education Secretary Margaret Spellings is scheduled to approve the states in time for them to publish AYP results in growth-model format for the 2007-08 school year, reported Education Week.

To be eligible for participation, states must, among other criteria, gauge whether students are on track to attain reading and math proficiency by 2014 and make sure their testing systems produce consistent results across grade levels.

After originally capping growth-model program participation at 10 states, and approving just eight, department officials opened eligibility in December to all qualified states. The first states to use growth models in the pilot project have done so without compromising the law's goals, officials told EdWeek.

The eight states that are already reporting growth-model performance results are: Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, Delaware, Florida, Iowa, North Carolina and Tennessee.

Resources: For more information on the growth-model pilot, visit www.ed.gov/admins/lead/account/growthmodel/proficiency.html.