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The No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), a reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, required states to establish accountability plans. For most states, these plans rely on a single year’s assessment at specific grade levels to determine how many students are achieving profi-ciency on the state’s academic standards. Most of these mod-els focus the school district’s attention on students who are not achieving rather than those who are already proficient or who are above proficiency. Researchers have argued that these static models (i.e., one point-in-time testing) tend to reflect input characteristics of schools such as student enrollment charac-teristics rather than actual school quality (Goldschmidt et al., 2005). In 2005, the U.S. Secretary of Education announced the federal growth model pilot program as an alternative method for meeting adequate yearly progress (AYP). In contrast to sta-tus models, growth models are developed to track individual student performance over time. For the most part, these pro