Metro Schools Director Pedro Garcia remains optimistic about the state of Nashville’s schools in the light of the latest No Child Left Behind statistics.

Today,Garcia lead a briefing on the district’s Adequate Yearly Progress, or AYP, results for the past school year.

Thirty-two of the system’s 132 schools are considered High Priority, and another eighteen received warning that they will move to the High Priority list if they do not improve enough this year.

But Garcia says most Metro schools are showing improvement from year to year, even if some are not progressing quickly enough to make AYP. And he emphasized that even if a school falls short of only one of the 32 benchmarks considered for AYP, it will fail altogether.

“This is how I feel about-let’s say you took a test and the test is 130 questions, and you miss one. What grade would you expect if you have 130 questions and you got a 129 right? Probably an A, but in No Child Left Behind it’s an F. And that’s just something that…I don’t know if it’s fair, but it’s just so misleading.”

Garcia says too many high schools fail because not enough students graduate. According to the latest available figures, the district has a 60-percent graduation rate, well short of the 90-percent Tennessee schools need to achieve AYP.

Another challenge for Metro is raising the test scores of English Language Learners, which were included in the determination of AYP for the first time. Metro educates about one-third of the state’s ELL students.

Newly elected school board member David Fox attended the meeting. He says feedback he’s gotten from parents supports the administration’s conclusions.

“The results point out that we have our work cut out for us. I think the attitudes are correct, there have been some important areas of progress and I think we need to examine the areas that have been working so well and extend them to other schools.”

The district is currently appealing the AYP results of six schools.