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How does the Safe Harbor provision work?

Safe Harbor is one other way that a school, district, or state can meet AYP even if one or more of their subgroups failed to achieve the reading and/or math AMO. This provision, outlined in the No Child Left Behind legislation, only applies when the following conditions are met:

1. All students met the AMO for the reading and math indicators.
2. All students and each subgroup met the required participation rate of at least 95%.
3. All students met the AMO for the other academic indicator - attendance or graduation rate.

The Safe Harbor provision in NCLB is designed to take into account substantial growth in the performance of subgroups when the subgroup does not meet the AMO.

Let's take a school that failed to meet AYP because one subgroup (let's say the FARMS subgroup) did not meet the reading AMO. However, they did meet the eligibility criteria identified by NCLB.

Under Safe Harbor, there are three conditions the school needs to meet in order for them to attain AYP.

1. The school has reduced by 10% the # of students performing below proficient in that subgroup from the year before.
2. The subgroup has met the attendance or graduation rate AMO.
3. The subgroup has met the 95% participation rate.

Let's suppose that there are 100 students in our FARMs subgroup in this example and that 60 % of the students in 2003 performed below proficient (at the basic level). The Safe Harbor provision says that the school must see a 10% reduction in the number of students performing at the basic level from 2003 to 2004.

In this example 60% of the students performed at basic in 2003 which would translate to 60 students. A 10 % reduction would be 6 fewer students performing at the basic level leaving 54 students performing at basic in 2004. This would be 54% of the students performing at basic. Now, under Safe Harbor, the school is said to have met AYP because they met all three conditions.

Under Safe Harbor, we also apply the confidence interval concept for determining whether or not Safe Harbor was met.