  Doesn't NCLB Force States and Districts to Treat All Schools Not Making AYP the Same?No.Schools fail to make AYP for different reasons, and states and districts are expected to tailor their responses to each situation. For example, some schools did not make AYP solely because they didn't ensure that 95 percent of all their students in each subgroup took the state assessments. The interventions needed to make sure that school makes AYP next year are rather simple and easy to accomplish, usually involving the scheduling of make-up tests and extensive communication with students and their families emphasizing that attendance on test days is important. Many more schools fail to make AYP because enough children in a subgroup did not meet state standards. But the interventions needed to help a school reach its goals for students who are learning English might be quite different from the interventions needed to help a school meet its goals with its students with disabilities, or its African-American students. That said, however, many schools that do not make AYP will need help across the board in learning how to track and analyze student data, how to tailor individual responses to student difficulties, and how to think about school improvement. But there is nothing in No Child Left Behind that requires schools to be treated the same. It does require that schools that don't meet AYP have a plan that includes data on what areas need to be improved; strategies that the school will use to raise achievement; strategies for training and supporting teachers and principals; a description of how the state and district will help the school; and strategies to increase parental involvement. But NCLB does not mandate a particular plan. It merely says there must be a plan.
If, after six years of not meeting AYP goals, the school must be "restructured," states have wide latitude in defining what restructuring means, as long as it is targeted at fixing the problems the school has. For example, the principal and the main staff can be replaced, or the school can be completely reorganized. But if the school has met its AYP targets for all but one category, the intervention should be quite different from if it has failed to meet all the AYP targets, and NCLB allows for that variability.
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