The Associated Press State & Local Wire April 15, 2009

HEADLINE:  Half of Ind. Schools fail to meet progress goals

By Deanna Martin

About half of Indiana's schools failed to meet yearly federal benchmarks required under the No Child Left Behind law, sending some slipping further toward changes that could include replacing school leaders or reorganizing.

State schools chief Tony Bennett called the results unacceptable and said he's directing the Indiana Department of Education to look into consequences for some failing schools.

"We have to have a sense of urgency," Bennett said. "We are prepared to take whatever measures necessary to ensure that our children get the education they need and deserve."

Under federal law, districts that repeatedly fail to make progress can face corrective action by the state. That can include replacing staff, reorganizing, reducing administrative funds or having the state take over schools. The penalties apply only to schools that receive aid from the federal Title I program, which steers money to help students from poor families. Some schools have already gone through reorganization or taken other steps, and the penalties become steeper the longer the school fails to make annual progress.

Bennett said he had no timeline for when his department might take action but said he wanted to send a message that schools must improve especially those that are consistently not meeting targets.

"We should all be able to agree that doing nothing is not an option," Bennett said. "All options should be on the table to improve the performance of these chronically failing schools."

Among the school districts failing to meet AYP is Greater Clark County Schools, which Bennett led before being elected state superintendent of public instruction last year. The district has not met AYP since the state started measuring benchmarks in 2002. Bennett said he was disappointed with the results and would be having "hard discussions" about how to improve if he were still superintendent there.

The Indiana Department of Education says about 50 percent of schools and 83 percent of school districts made adequate yearly progress in 2008. Those are slightly lower percentages than the year before, when about 54 percent of schools and 84 percent of districts met federal goals.

Education officials say some of the drop can be explained by increased standards needed to hit the benchmarks.

Indiana is steadily raising the percentage of students that must pass English and math tests in order for schools and corporations to make annual yearly progress. In 2007, 65.7 percent of students had to pass English or math tests for a school to make AYP in that category, but that rose to 72.6 percent for the 2008 scores.
"The bar has been raised, but if Indiana students are going to compete with their peers from across the U.S. and around the world, we must continue to raise expectations across the board," Bennett said.

Educators had complained that the No Child Left Behind act, passed in 2001, treats schools the same no matter how close they come to meeting benchmarks. Then a new federal pilot program gave 10 states, including Indiana, the flexibility to assign different consequences to schools based on how far they are from goals.

Schools that fall under into "focused improvement" categories are closer to meeting benchmarks or are missing the goals in only a few areas. Indiana had 178 Title I schools in those categories in 2008. Schools in the "comprehensive improvement" categories are farther from meeting federal goals. There were 79 Title I schools in those categories, which require more drastic corrective action.
Of the state's 292 school corporations, 42 were in some stage of improvement status in 2008.

The results announced Wednesday were based on statewide tests given last fall.