The following information is provided in order to clarify information about the different areas addressed by the 2004-05 District Report Card and provide explanations for discrepancies between our report card and the state report card. You can also view the Quality of Ed Survey which provides local statistics.

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About Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) and the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB)
To a much greater extent than ever before, federal law defines how states measure student achievement and rate school performance. NCLB mandates that all students, regardless of ethnic or socioeconomic background, English-language proficiency, or disabilities, must meet the same standard of proficiency in reading and mathematics by the year 2014. Students must be tested on material included in the state standards that define what students know and should be able to do at each grade level. This meant that New Mexico had to develop entirely new achievement tests, since the CAT TerraNova used previously is not a standards-based test. In 2003-04 students in the fourth, eighth, and 11th grades were tested using the new, standards-based reading and math assessments.

Test results be reported for a school’s students as a whole and separately for students with disabilities, English-language learners, economically-disadvantaged students, and several ethnic groups. Each of these groups must show Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) towards achieving proficiency in order for a school to be designated as Meeting AYP.

If students in any single subgroup fails to make Adequate Yearly Progress towards achieving proficiency, the entire school and/or district is designated as “AYP Not Met.” In addition, if fewer than 95% of the students in any subgroup, or in the student body as a whole, take the test, the school does not meet AYP. A school may also fail to make AYP if its graduation rate (high school) or attendance rates (for elementary and middle schools) fall short of state-mandated targets.

This data provides parents, schools, and school districts with more information than ever before about how well specific groups of students are performing in the core subjects of reading and math. It will help teachers and parents target instruction to those students, and areas, that need extra help. However, this method of rating schools makes no distinction between schools that do not make AYP based on just one or two data points and those where there are issues with student performance across many subgroups. Parents and the public will have to look at the data much more closely than they have in the past in order to get a clear picture of a school’s ability to effectively educate students.

About Our Middle School Ratings
It is important to note that even though their students were not tested in 2003-04, Rio Rancho’s three middle schools were rated “AYP Not Met.” This designation was based on results from Rio Rancho Mid-High School, and not results from the middle schools themselves.

Rio Rancho’s middle schools include 6th and 7th grade. In 2003-04, the state did not have standards-based reading and math tests for students at those grade levels, so our middle school students did not have the opportunity to take such tests.

However, NCLB requires that all schools be rated, regardless of whether or not their students were tested. To meet the requirement, the New Mexico Public Education Department adopted the “feeder school methodology” defined in its report. Under this methodology, schools where students are not tested are rated based on the results of students in the school students move up to after leaving middle school. Seventh graders at all three middle schools attend Rio Rancho Mid-High in eighth grade, and therefore the ratings for the middle schools were based on the Mid-High’s eighth grade results. It should be noted that the Mid-High failed to make AYP in just two areas: reading proficiency for English-language learners, and the participation rate for special education students.

About Board Member Participation in Training
The Rio Rancho Public Schools Board of Education strongly endorses ongoing training for its members. As noted in that section of the report card, the points reported for board members reflect only training sponsored by the New Mexico School Board Association, and not any other training board members may have attended. It also reports only points accumulated in a single year, which may give a misleading picture of a board member’s overall training and experience. For example, Rio Rancho’s longest-serving board member, Lisa Cour, has accumulated 93 points in training sessions over eight years.

About the Reporting of Teacher Qualifications
NCLB requires that all teachers in public schools be “highly qualified” by the year 2006. This means that at the elementary school level teachers have completed all coursework and other requirements for full licensure. At the middle school and high school level, teachers must have significant coursework (24-36 academic hours, usually enough to hold a minor degree) in each subject area taught by the teacher.

Because this is a relatively new requirement, both the district’s and the state’s systems for capturing, tracking, and reporting this data are in an early stage of development. Therefore, we found a considerable disconnect between the Rio Rancho district’s data and the state data in this area. At some schools, the state’s data substantially underreports the number of highly qualified teachers. This occurs for a variety of reasons:

Our principals have provided the following data on the percent of teachers in their schools in the spring of 2004 that they considered “highly qualified:”