This year, Pennsylvania schools will have an additional way to meet the student progress measure known as adequate yearly progress or AYP.

The U.S. Department of Education has approved an additional tool, the Pennsylvania Value-Added Assessment System, which measures student growth to see whether students are on a trajectory to success. If that measure had been in place for the spring 2008 tests, another 242 schools would have met AYP, according to a report filed with the state in the fall.

State Education Secretary Gerald Zahorchak today said that some schools that began with low rates of proficiency but had strong growth didn't get credit for it. "Without this growth model, the academic gains of many of these schools would have been discounted or overlooked entirely, which is patently unfair to these students and their teachers."

On the 2008 math and reading tests, 2,134 schools made AYP and another 97 were making progress towards that. Another 869 schools did not make AYP. Under the federal No Child Left Behind Act, there is a series of sanctions against such schools, depending on how long they have missed the mark.