Twenty  of our public schools in the Fairbanks area made "Adequate Yearly Progress" in the past year, while 15 did not.

But as in previous years, it is impossible to say exactly what this means about the quality of education in any of those schools. The state education department released the details last week.

Statewide, 203 schools failed to make adequate progress, while 302 made the mark.

As a means of judging educational achievement, the process used to determined AYP in Alaska has always been inadequate. For some of our schools, there is real significance in either a positive or a negative rating. For others, there is not.

The critical problem with the state system, constructed to meet a federal mandate, is that the cumbersome way in which achievement is measured is inflexible. The mathematical formulas are  not sophisticated enough to deal with the variables that determine educational progress.

Every school is judged by 31 categories  that provide many chances for a school to fail and make it onto the list of those not making adequate progress. There are  no allowances made for what might be called the educational intangibles that are vital to a good education.

The quirks in this overly bureaucratic system distort reality.

One example of the limitations of this measuring tool is that while the school at the Fairbanks Youth Facility is deemed to have met AYP, Lathrop High School did not. The youth facility serves a needed purpose, but there is no question that the opportunities for students are superior at Lathrop.

In 2008/2009, the youth facility first made it onto the list of schools making adequate progress because it had five students who earned diplomas. "In previous years, our low graduation rate has prevented us from attaining AYP due to the high number of General Education Degrees our kids obtain," a state budget document said last December.

To get a GED, a student at the youth facility has to drop out of school. If a handful of kids drop out to get GEDs, the school fails to meet AYP.  So if several kids decide to stay enrolled at the youth facility and not go the GED route, does that really tell us that the school has made progress while Lathrop has not? Of course not.

In the 2009-10 year, the Fairbanks Youth Facility had  only four students enrolled in grade 10 or below on the first day of testing. For that reason, the school was judged to be too small to be judged on 30 of the individual targets applied to larger schools. The only category on which it was judged was whether all but two students took the tests. 

Lathrop was judged to not make AYP for missing four of the 31 targets. Those are the performance of Asian students on language and math scores and the performance of "economically disadvantaged" students and disabled students on language scores.

At West Valley, there were 23 Asian students, two less than the 25 minimum to be counted as a subgroup, so their scores did not count as a subgroup. We don't know how they performed.

At Lathrop there were 39 Asian students, so their scores as a subgroup did count.

Though there are nearly twice as many economically disadvantaged students at Lathrop as at West Valley, 172 to 89. The state documents show that in both schools 66 percent of the economically disadvantaged students met the achievement target set for the year in language arts.

But only Lathrop was marked down as not making adequate progress for that reason. I am waiting to hear from the education folks in Juneau about whether that  is a mistake in the reporting or if I am reading it incorrectly.

In most cases, the subgroups are small and not representative of the entire school. It is important to note those scores, but it would be more logical to look at the performance of the entire school. 

Having said all that, there is some value is this process. What's important for the community is to look at the reasons why a school did or did not make AYP and then make a judgment about whether they are trivial matters or something of real importance.

In every case, a more detailed analysis is needed to determine the educational quality of the school and whether improvement is taking place. The reports are valuable in that they do show which schools have higher or lower percentages of minorities and low income students and how the various racial and socio-economic groups are performing.

These are the local schools that did not make AYP:

The Alternative Learning Systems, Anne Wien Elementary, Badger Road Elementary, Denali Elementary, Effie Kokrine Charter School, Joy Elementary, Ladd Elementary, Lathrop High School, North Pole High School, North Pole Middle School, Pearl Creek Elementary, Ryan Middle School, Ticasuk Brown Elementary, Weller Elementary and Woodriver Elementary.

The schools that made AYP are:

Hutchison High School, University Park Elementary, Fairbanks B.E.S.T., Watershed Charter School, Fairbanks Youth Facility, Randy Smith Middle School, Crawford Elementary, Arctic Light Elementary, Star of the North Elementary School, Salcha Elementary, North Pole Elementary, Nordale Elementary, Tanana Middle School, West Valley High School, Hunter Elementary, Ben Eielson Jr/Sr High, Anderson Elementary, Barnette Magnet School, Chinook Charter School and Two Rivers Elementary.