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Defining "failing" simply by measuring achievement penalizes schools for factors beyond their control, not how well teachers teach or students learn.
Although the No Child Left Behind Act refers to "low performing" schools as "in need of improvement," no one outside of the U.S. Department of Education uses that phrase. The term most commonly used is failing. NCLB offers a single, explicit definition of a failing school: one that fails to make adequate yearly progress for two or more years in a row. (The recent safe harbor provision exempts schools that reduce the percentage of a failing subgroup by 10%.)
But there are other ways to define a school's success or failure. Downey, von Hippel, and Hughes (2008) question the NCLB method of defining schools in terms of gross achievement (i.e., test scores). They suggest two other ways to do so - by measuring learning or by measuring impact - and propose that impart is the most promising model for accounting for the effect of nonschool factors on learning:
The advantage of an approach based on learning is that schools are not rewarded or penalized for the achievement level of their students at the beginning of the school year.... Schools that serve disadvantaged students could be deemed "effective" if the students made substantial progress. . .even if their final achievement level was still somewhat low. (p. 245)
But there is also an important limitation to a learning-based approach: the large amount of time children spend out of school. Calculating time in and out of school on...