"For the first time since Virginia started rating its school divisions in accordance with the No Child Left Behind law, the Charlottesville division has met the federal benchmark for school progress.

School officials on Thursday credited the division’s success to a more constant, united curriculum using a “pacing guide” and to a more personal approach with at-risk students.

“We sat down and aligned curriculum to the standards and had a consistent format in all the core content areas,” said Gertrude Ivory, assistant superintendent for instruction. “Groups of teachers from Johnson [Elementary] can now get together with teachers from Burnley-Moran [Elementary] and talk the same language.”

Annual Yearly Progress, as it is called, is measured using results from Standards of Learning tests taken by Virginia students in certain grades each spring. For a school division and an individual school to have met AYP benchmarks for this year, 73 percent of students in six subgroups must have passed the reading SOL test and 71 percent had to pass the math exam. These pass rates will increase incrementally each year with the goal of reaching 100 percent in both subjects by 2014, as stipulated in No Child Left Behind.

The student groups for which school divisions must report test scores: low-income, white, black, Hispanic, students with disabilities and limited English.

The latest figures were included in a report released by the Virginia Department of Education on Thursday.

Of the nine city schools, Charlottesville High and Clark Elementary did not meet AYP goals based on the results from last year. Charlottesville High also failed to reach the goals in 2005 or 2004, while Clark did not meet AYP in 2004 or 2003.

Though CHS and Clark failed to meet the goals, the division’s overall success was sufficient to meet AYP.

Buford Middle, however, earned a passing grade for the first time since No Child Left Behind’s introduction, and Walker Upper Elementary met benchmarks for the first time in three years.

“The staff here is celebrating the news,” said Walker’s principal, Terri Perkins. “I think it’s the result of good old-fashioned hard work.”

Conferences that administrators, teachers and guidance counselors had with at-risk students and their families were instrumental in improving achievement, Ivory said.

The identified students were given written plans outlining a path that led to a high school diploma, she said.

“We took a personal responsibility based on those conferences to see that those children met the benchmarks and were successful,” Ivory said. “We stayed with those students and followed them. And that is a true testament to Ms. Atkins because she initiated it.”

This fall marks Rosa S. Atkins’ second year as Charlottesville’s superintendent.

Critics of the standards-based school culture created by No Child Left Behind say that “teaching to a test” and aligning curriculums to standards stifle creativity among teachers.

Ivory said the mission of administrators in recent years has been to help teachers work within the standards and balance meeting benchmarks with providing arenas for critical thinking.

“All of the teachers were saying they were teaching to standards,” Ivory said, “but then we started to unpack the standards and made them understand that you had to teach to not only topical content, but also what you can do with a concept.”

She pointed to the involvement of more than 150 teachers in the division’s “pacing guide” as evidence that administrators are working with teachers.

“We’re not telling a teacher how you teach, because how you do it is your own personal style,” Ivory said. “What we have clarified is what the expectation is about what to teach.”

Perkins, who taught at Charlottesville High from 1993 to 2003 and as a math coordinator at Walker before becoming its principal, understood the balancing act that teachers face.

“It is tricky and I haven’t been away from teaching long enough to be beyond sympathizing,” she said. “It’s not about limiting your own style. You have to teach what’s on the SOLs, but the way in which you do it is still up to the teacher.”

In mid-September, the state Department of Education will release school accreditation ratings - a more detailed assessment of students that evaluates them in English, history, math and science based on SOL scores." (Matt Deegan, The Daily Progress, August 23, 2007)