Adequate Yearly Progress: it's the mantra that school principals chant when they do yoga. Curriculum supervisors long for it. Associate superintendents travel their districts swinging a stick that has the words (or at least the initials - AYP) carved into its side. Reading specialists prowl their hallways stalking students who might hinder the achieving of it. Everyone from the Director of Technology to the district's head of Title I wants schools to make AYP. Even the Special Education Director. Perhaps especially the Special Education Director.
A decade ago the question was easy. How is this school system doing? Someone would pipe up and say something like, "Well, on average, when you look at all the aggregate data, we're doing pretty good."
Aggregate: flock, formed by the collection of units or particles into a body, mass, or amount. (From Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary.
The aggregate data: all the information available flocked together. Times have changed.
And No Child Left Behind (NCLB) brought about the change. The accountability provisions of NCLB mandated a new approach to answering the question. Instead of answering the question, "How is this school system doing?" by compiling the aggregate data, now school boards the nations over are required to look at the DISaggregate data. They have to take the compiled information apart and phrase the question in terms of individual data subsections. How is this school system doing with its female students? How is this school system doing with its poor (or socioeconomic status) students? How is this school system doing with its ethnic minority students? Its Hispanics? Its Asians? Its American Indians? And how is this school system doing with its students with disabilities? Yes, with its students with disabilities?
We break a schools students down now into a matrix of cells and look at the individual cells. Many (sometimes most) students appear in more than one cell. A middle school with 200 students may have 135 socioeconomic status students, 120 Whites, 50 Blacks, 32 English as a Second Language (ESL) Students, 28 special education students, and 25 Hispanics. A single individual student could show up in four of these disaggregate cells. For example, the student could be from a poor family, be white, speak Ukrainian at home (and thus be an ESL student), and be in the special education category because he is hearing impaired. If he earns a low score on his state's academic achievement test, perhaps that score does not greatly affect the socioeconomic status cell with its 135 students or the White cell with 120 students in it. But his score has a larger impact on the ESL cell and the special education cell.
