Fairfax County Public Schools

Fairfax County Public Schools exceeded the harder standards set by No Child Left Behind for 2010, outperforming each of the surrounding districts in the Virginia suburbs.

But even as the 175,000-student school system earned "adequate yearly progress," or AYP, as a whole, 54 of its 190 schools failed to meet the mark. That's up from 36 schools that couldn't keep pace in 2009.

Theoretically, if a school, a district or a state meets its AYP goals each year, then by the federal legislation's 2014 finish line, every student would be proficient in math and reading -- at least as measured by the state's standardized exams.

Overall, most of the Virginia suburbs stayed at last year's levels or saw slight improvements. But among certain subgroups, those improvements were not enough. Prince William County, for example, failed to meet the federal standards because of insufficient progress among its special-needs students. In Loudoun County, Arlington County and Alexandria, students with limited English skills failed to perform on par. In Alexandria and Arlington, so too did low-income students.

Schools that fail to meet AYP for two years in a row enter into an "improvement" phase. Parents are often given the option to transfer to higher-performing schools, and districts must show extra effort is being made toward raising achievement.

Throughout the Washington region, 2010 has proven an especially disheartening year. Montgomery County failed to earn AYP based mostly on insufficient progress among special-needs students and middle schoolers. In the District, only 15 of nearly 200 traditional and charter schools hit the targets, down from 54 in 2009 -- largely because of a large leap in performance expectations.

Each of the states' schools and districts had slightly different targets to meet, based on their rates of progress since the law's passage in 2000. That distinction, with different tests used by different states, makes AYP comparisons across the Potomac's dividing lines virtually impossible.

Patricia Wright, Virginia's superintendent of public instruction, said that the failure of all but 12 of the state's 132 school divisions to meet the standards, even as students improved slightly overall, proves the need for a different form of measuring progress.

"Virginia has reached a point with its annual benchmarks that it is more appropriate to look at growth in the performance of individual students rather than simple pass rates that apply to all subgroups equally," she said.