Abstract
Students in California Public Schools are increasingly failing to meet or exceed state proficiency standards found in the No Child Left Behind Accountability Act of 2002. Although there has been growth in every significant subgroup of proficiency in ELA and Mathematics in the state of California to include Students with Disabilities, Socially Economically Disadvantaged and English Language Learners subgroups, increasingly all student subgroups are failing to keep up with the pace needed reach proficiency targets each year. Three consecutive years of statewide descriptive data on NCLB AYP performance targets was collected from the California Department of Education on school years 2007, 2008 and 2009 of some 3,700,000 students and 6000 schools. The findings were although proficiency rates of ELA and Mathematics have grown every year since 2007 for each subgroup on an average of two to four percent, state and federal AYP targets are growing an average of eleven percent each year, making it impossible for subgroups to make targets causing more and more schools to fall into Program Improvement Status and be labeled consistently low performing. AYP targets as they currently exist are unrealistic. Therefore it is recommended that California education legislation be amended to use more equitable measures of performance that include, but are not limited to: proficiency targets based on the trend of growth for each subgroup. That legislation is research led, and that K-12 performance tests be connected to college and career readiness outcomes rather than what currently exists, which is proficiency for proficiency stake.