The AFT believes you can’t fix AYP by playing around the margins. To make this AYP target work in public schools, lawmakers must show courage and common sense— and they must endorse fundamental changes in the way AYP is designed and implemented. For the sake of preserving true accountability that helps schools achieve the legitimate goals of NCLB and helps each child get the best possible education, Congress and the White House must ensure that AYP makes the grade in these key areas: 

• AYP must set challenging but demonstrably attainable student progress goals.
   
• AYP must judge school effectiveness—the only valid and fair basis for accountability—and not out-of-school factors that are beyond educators’ control. That can only be done if AYP is changed to measure the progress that schools achieve with the same students over time.
   
• AYP must truly “leave no child behind” by producing accurate accountability decisions without excluding certain groups of students, and by holding large and small schools, as well as diverse and homogeneous schools, equally accountable for their performance.
   
• AYP must maintain reporting on student achievement by subgroup. This subgroup reporting must be done without giving schools dozens of ways of being declared “failures” and only one way to make AYP.
   
• AYP must honor and enforce the letter of the law when it comes to helping states create valid, reliable and scientifically based standards that underpin the targets.