“You’re not only trying to make the mark this year,” Alberts said, going on to explain how difficult it is to measure educational success using these numbers. As each year’s benchmarks are higher and higher, it’s impossible to make any sort of comparison between test results that one set of students got between years.

It’s as though each year was a snapshot of results of a given group of students, and since the goals change from year to year, comparing the results of the students in, say, third grade from 2009 to the third grade results from 2006 wouldn’t be fair, since the goals in 2006 were lower than the goals in 2009.

“It doesn’t compare one child’s growth from one year to the next,” Krenz said. “It compares a group of kids’ growth to the next year’s group of kids’ growth. If you really want to be fair to the individual, you have to be comparing how that child grows individually.”

To the district’s credit, all of Austin’s schools have hit a majority of the goal areas that make up the state’s total Adequate Yearly Progress. Southgate hit all of their progress goals last year, making them one of an elite group of schools across the state to do so. Austin High School made all but one of their goals, meeting 94.7 percent of last year’s progress goals. Ellis only missed one goal as well, but since they had more goals to make, they met 96.8 percent of their goals.

While this is a marked improvement from the results of previous years, in actuality Austin’s progress over the last several years is slightly below the state’s average progress in Math, Reading and Science. The district has increased the amount of students who meet Math goals by roughly the same amount as the state has, but always trails the state average by at least 3 percent.