On remembering what the numbers mean

At last night's State of the Schools address, the exchange I found most interesting was one only partly covered in today's paper. A gentleman asked, in effect, are we going to make it? No Child Left Behind requires that all children be performing at or above proficient on their state tests by 2014; is Worcester going to be there?
Now the reporter didn't entirely miss it--Superintendent Boone was undeniably positive in her answer, reviewing increasing test scores, the work done at various schools, and so on. But the most telling part, I thought, was this, which didn't make the paper.

No one thought we were going to be there.

Now, she's absolutely right*, that anyone who has any real familiarity with the enormous assortment of kids served in our schools (locally or nationally) did not think that every single one of them--and I'm thinking here of some of the severely disabled, or kids who are just not up to grade level, or just got here from somewhere else--were going to be taking and achieving proficiently on state tests in 2014. But back in 2001, 2014 felt really far away, and leaving "no child" behind lent itself nicely to 100%.
The states dealt with this different ways. The first, for the states that didn't already have statewide testing, was to create an easy test. You get your numbers up nice and high to start with, you can easily keep them there, and maybe this will all go away by the time you start to get close to 2014 and somehow have to make this 100%.**
The requirement, however, was that states, districts, schools, show "adequate yearly progress" towards that 100%. So if you started out with 80% of kids making the mark, you had to show the feds that you were getting that higher: to 81, 85, and so forth.
The states were allowed to set their year-by-year goals, however, which led to another way that states dealt with this: they made different curves. Assuming, again, that this would all go away as we started to get to 2014 and people started to notice that the numbers weren't near 100, many states set low, achievable goals for the first few years, and showed a graph with amazing gains in the years closer to 2014.
You may have noticed that 2014 is fast approaching.
If you don't hit your goals for a certain number of years, you've got an "underperforming" school. Plenty of states have had relatively few underperforming schools for a number of years. If you've got an easier test and a nice low curve, you can hit AYP for plenty of years.
We're starting to hit a steeper part of the curve, now, though, and nationwide, the numbers are going up.

Now, Massachusetts was an exception on both counts. We already had the MCAS, which, whatever its faults, isn't an easy test, and our state education officials opted for a steady increase on the AYP chart. We've had larger numbers of underperforming schools for longer because of the way the state has chosen to implement NCLB. What was considered "adequate" in Massachusetts isn't what was "adequate" elsewhere. Our numbers are continuing to go up, too--I heard a DESE official estimate that we could be as high as 70% underperforming statewide possibly next year. When we talk about "underperforming" or "level 4" or whatever the latest term is, it helps to remember that this all has to do with how you've stacked the deck on NCLB...which had a goal that no one thought we were going to reach, anyway.

*and, in fairness to Superintendent Boone, I should note that she added, "but it made it possible for us to aim for 80%" per the Worcester Compact
**and ESEA comes up for renewal every few years, anyway, so there's a good chance the rules will change. They usually do.