Kim Snider is a pretty plugged-in parent. She has three children in Bend-La Pine Schools and has checked out Web sites in the past to make sure her kids are enrolled in top-performing schools.

Snider has a basic understanding of the No Child Left Behind law, and how it’s supposed to improve public education.

“I think of it as making sure each child meets requirements so that someone is not falling behind and falling under the bar,” she said.

But she doesn’t really know what adequate yearly progress is. And she’s not alone.

“I don’t think many people know what it is,” said Bend-La Pine Schools Superintendent Ron Wilkinson. “I think most people have heard of No Child Left Behind, and they know AYP has something to do with it.”

With final adequate yearly progress reports due today from the Oregon Department of Education, some area school officials say the reports ought to be taken with a grain of salt, or at least recognized for what they really are: a measure of progress within the district, not an indicator of whether a district is good or bad at educating students.

AYP is an annual progress report for schools to determine whether they’re on their way to meeting the main goal of the No Child Left Behind Act: to have every student nationwide reach proficiency in language arts and math by 2014. States create goals for schools and districts to meet each year, and districts whose students meet those benchmarks meet AYP.

Vickie Fleming, the superintendent for the Redmond School District, said the problem with the AYP reports is that they were never meant to measure the quality of a school district.

“I think the intent was not really to say whether schools are doing a good job or not but to shine a light on students who are not progressing like we’d hoped they would,” Fleming said. “The profound aspect of No Child Left Behind was that universal access to education now means universal proficiency, and that’s a huge leap. And when we say all, this law holds us accountable for that expectation. All means all.”

But, she said, the way AYP is measured oversimplifies the results schools are seeing.

“When you throw words around like failing, then the sound bite is very negative,” Fleming said. “Those of us who believe in the intent of the law embrace the information, and we do what must be done with it.”

That means taking the reports, figuring out which groups of students in the district are struggling the most, and figuring out what can be done to help those students.

“The law has done what it was intended to do, which is to focus attention around knowing who is making it and who is not,” she said, and the problem with that is the work of teachers and the work of schools isn’t a science, but something she called inexact.

For Wilkinson, the issue is simple: “If AYP is supposed to be a measure of whether a public school is performing at a high level or not, then it’s not a good measure.

“As an internal measure, it’s great, but if you take an internal measure and make it a public measure of how schools are doing, it’s a problem.”

He’s got his reasons.

This year, the Oregon Department of Education announced that 61 percent of all Oregon school districts met AYP. But Wilkinson has a problem with that, particularly after looking at the districts that reached the AYP goals. Only six of those 68 districts have enrollments of more than 1,000 students, and the average size of Oregon school districts that reached AYP goals is 459 students. Bend-La Pine, as the seventh largest district in the state, has more than 15,500 students.

“I made a comment at a board meeting, I said it would be interesting to look at the enrollments of those school districts,” Wilkinson said. “And I was told we can’t make excuses. I’m not trying to make excuses, but what does AYP really mean?”

Wilkinson likens meeting AYP to a game of blackout bingo. Each district has dozens of squares it must black out to achieve AYP, from Asian students passing the math component to economically disadvantaged kids passing the English component. The problem is, some school districts start their games of blackout bingo with most of the squares already filled in.

“If you’ve got no subgroups, you’ve got a good chance of meeting (AYP),” he said.

For large districts, he said, it’s too easy to fail in reaching for the state’s benchmarks, because they traditionally have all of the various subgroups of students who tend to struggle to meet the benchmarks.

“All the flaws in the system become the real controllers,” Wilkinson said.

As a result, Wilkinson said Bend-La Pine Schools have instead tried to focus on the Oregon report card, which grades schools on a variety of aspects, including test scores, and provides a final score of anything from unacceptable to excellent.

However, Wilkinson does believe AYP reports have done something good for districts: It has forced them to be accountable for students who have traditionally been ignored in public education, kids who are just learning English or who are in special education programs. Now that those students are also expected to be proficient in English and math, districts are doing what is necessary to make sure they receive a quality education, too.

“It has caused us all to be very attentive in looking at subgroups,” he said. “But part of what the data tells us is it helps us figure out which groups we’re not serving and … we can put strategies in place to deal with them.”

What is AYP?

AYP measures a school or district’s proficiency in English and in mathematics, and breaks down the school and district population into subgroups that include economically disadvantaged, limited English proficiency, students with disabilities and all racial subgroups.

In Oregon, students take the Oregon Assessment of Knowledge and Skills (OAKS) tests, and those test scores are used to determine AYP academic status and growth.

The subgroups are measured in their participation levels, their academic status and growth, and other measures, including attendance and graduation rates.

Participation levels are the number of students taking the tests. Parents can opt out of testing their students, and if students don’t participate, that counts against schools.

Any schools that receive federal Title I funding for impoverished children are subject to consequences if they don’t meet AYP expectations. Those consequences start in the third year, with schools being called “in need of improvement,” and they must create a plan to combat the problems. If the failures continue, schools must pay for tutoring and supplemental services for kids, as well as pay to bus the students to other schools in their district. Beyond that schools will have to take corrective actions, like replacing school staff or extending the school day.

But for a school that doesn’t receive Title I funds, AYP is simply a measurement and nothing more.