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by Joe Sullivan

At first blush, the standards set by the federal No Child Left Behind Act appear unattainable. Under the act, every student at every public school is expected to become proficient in reading and math at every grade level by 2014. And each state has been required to set targets for making “adequate yearly progress” in each school toward meeting that objective over the next decade.

It’s a worthy undertaking to be sure. But given the daunting challenges that schools face in teaching children with disadvantaged backgrounds, dysfunctional families and various disabilities, one has to question whether it’s realistic to make them all proficient.

A lot depends, though, on how proficiency is defined. And in Tennessee that definition doesn’t appear to be overly demanding. In setting its standards, the state Department of Education has drawn a line that arbitrarily classified last year’s TCAP test scores of 80 percent of the state’s students as proficient. Said the other way around, the line was drawn in a way that establishes as a benchmark test scores that only 20 percent of students fell short of. So it’s not as if making progress toward NCLB targets means getting them up to a state average or some other, more rigorous standard of what’s often referred to as performing at grade level.

Last year’s benchmark scores will serve as a baseline against which adequate yearly progress (AYP) will be measured over the next decade. So neither is proficiency some kind of moving target.

Using third-grade reading to illustrate how AYP targets work, this year’s target for third grade is 77 percent proficiency in each school. Next year it will rise to 83 percent, and then, in three more steps at three-year intervals, to 100 percent in 2014. Special dispensations are due to be made for students with severe learning disabilities, but those have yet to be defined.

Of Knox County’s 47 elementary schools, 14 fell below the 77 percent mark for third-grade reading last year. Most of those were center city schools with high concentrations of disadvantaged students. Without special intervention, their path to achieving NCLB targets would be highly problematic.

Fortunately, for 10 of them, that intervention is coming in the form of Project GRAD. From its base in Houston that’s now been extended to 11 other cities, Project GRAD brings specialized curriculum, social services and the promise of college scholarships to the inner city schools it supports. Knox County schools embraced it in 2001. Its “Success For All” reading and “Move It Math” programs were introduced on a pilot basis last year with remarkable success at Maynard School, whose proficiency scores were by far the lowest in the city.

According to Project Grad’s curriculum coordinator, Velinda Carpino, only nine of this year’s 31 third graders were reading at grade level when the program started. Now, 16 are doing so, and 12 others “are getting very close.”

“Move It Math” was introduced this year in all 10 Project Grad elementary schools, and “Success For All” reading will be extended to them next year. With an annual budget of $3.4 million in mostly private funds and a full-time staff of 34, the program provides intensive teacher training, tutoring and social services to troubled students and their families.

Even if the schools don’t get all the way to NCLB proficiency targets within a year or two, they seem assured of making AYP. That’s because the law also allows for its attainment if the number of non-proficient students in a school is reduced by 10 percent or more in any given year. Thus, a school where 40 percent of students were below target last year can make AYP by getting down to 36 percent this year.

With one caveat, the coordinator of Knox County elementary schools, Fran Thomforde, is optimistic that other (non-Project Grad) below-target schools will also make AYP in the lower grades. Her caveat is that the NCLB targets apply not only to a school’s student body as a whole but also to several subgroups of students in each school (e.g. economically disadvantaged, black, and English-as-a-second-language learners). And there are statistical quirks involved in applying the targets to these subgroups.

In the view of Thomforde and many other educators, sustained progress toward NCLB’s 2014 goal requires concentration on youngsters just entering school (to which I would add pre-schoolers). “Early intervention is the key. If you start with third graders you’re too late,” Thomforde says. And Project GRAD’s executive director, Jerry Hodges, acknowledges that, “The data tells you that if children aren’t reading at grade level by third grade, they likely never will.”

That doesn’t bode well for reaching targets in upper grades in NCLB’s early years, and expecting middle schools and high schools to do so is where the law appears unrealistic. But the high school seniors of 2014 are in second grade today; so the prospects for sustained NCLB attainment on their part are more favorable.

Another widespread concern about the law is that, by focusing solely on reading and math improvement, it can divert attention in the classroom away from science, social studies, and other subject matter. But it must also be borne in mind that reading and math proficiency are crucial to success in science. So NCLB may have correctly put first things first.

Above all else, the primacy is on getting specialized instruction, such as Project GRAD offers, to students with special needs. When a school’s teachers and support staff are proficient in meeting those needs, student proficiency will likely follow.