More On School System "Grading"...

Yesterday we looked at which school system was achieving what. Today we'll scope out some WHYS regarding the results OF those grades:

In today's Journal-Gazette (editorial page):

SCHOOLS AND ACCOUNTABILITY
Plan to use Indiana’s Public Law 221 categories as your measure of school quality? Good luck – it will take some work to make sense of them. And even after you invest the time and effort; be advised that the measurements don’t tell the entire story. For example:
•Five schools in the Fort Wayne Community Schools district achieved commendable ranking under the state P.L. 221 accountability requirements, but were held to the academic progress category because they didn’t meet the federal requirement for adequate yearly progress for two consecutive years.
•Summit Middle School, in the Southwest Allen County Schools district, was also held to the academic progress category because its special education students did not meet ISTEP+ targets for two consecutive years.
•Another SACS school, Homestead High School, slipped from exemplary to commendable in spite of being honored by Newsweek magazine recently as one of the nation’s top high schools.

Lowell Rose, a consultant for the Indiana Urban Schools Association, said the problem is the source for the rankings.
“As long as we are using the standard of students passing ISTEP+, growth by students in a corporation or school will go unrewarded and the findings will be determined by those close to the ISTEP+ passing bar,” Rose said. “It is unlikely that validity and reliability can be built into the findings in such situations.”

He pointed out the inconsistencies in how a specific improvement percentage is treated by the P.L. 221 requirements: Where 90 percent or more students are passing ISTEP+, improvement by 1.5 percent goes unrewarded; at 80 percent passing, a 1.5 percent gain bumps a school from commendable to exemplary; at 70 percent passing, it assigns a school to academic progress; at 60 percent passing, it translates to academic watch.

The adequate yearly progress requirement that tripped up five FWCS schools and Summit Middle School amounts to a penalty, according to Rose. Yet a school could be rewarded with assignment to the same academic progress category by posting as little as 1 percentage point improvement in ISTEP+ passing scores of just 50 percent.
If there’s any value to the P.L. 221 category assignments, it’s in reinforcing what is so glaringly obvious in all accountability rankings – the link between performance and poverty. Districtwide placements in the exemplary category overwhelmingly include school corporations with the least number of students who qualify for a free- or reduced-price lunch: Southwest Allen, Carmel, Zionsville. In the academic probation category, it’s the districts with the poorest students: Indianapolis Public Schools, Gary, East Chicago.

The link is obvious even among private and parochial schools. Benoit Academy is the only northeast Indiana parochial school in the watch category. About 65 percent of its students qualify for free- or reduced-price lunch.
In the end, P.L. 221 categories don’t offer parents looking to weigh a school or district’s quality the magic measure. The state’s annual performance reports continue to provide a better snapshot, including not just ISTEP+ scores, but also average class sizes, per-pupil expenditures and expulsion rates. If parents insist on using the accountability law measure, however, they should be prepared to dig much deeper to determine how a school earned its label.

Now we can take this two ways:

1) As gospel

2) With a grain of salt

My experience would tell me that ANY statistics have the "potential" to be manipulated, depending on what type of "rise" you wish to get out of our readership. The manner in which it is EXPLAINED can lead to false conclusions. It's like the wording of a question...you can spin it pro OR con, depending on HOW you phrase it.

In this case, I can make a case both FOR and AGAINST this ISTEP+ testing, as I'm sure you could do as well. Using the ISTEP+ as the sole barometer as to student achievement DOES allow for the basis for unrewarded students...no doubt about it. So our teachers should teach their classes JUST towards the test, right? I don't think that would be my first choice. All that will accomplish is to make the kids able to take a test...and pass with flying colors. That will most certainly skew their ACTUAL achievement. Being able to pass ONE test does NOT make ANY student worthy of the phrase "complete knowledge and mastery of the subject matter".

And therein lies our problem. We can add to that the whole "poverty holds certain students back" issue. Which, in this blogger's opinion will always fall on deaf east. Poverty should never be used as the crutch it has become. Some of the POOREST people throughout history have OVERCOME such obstacles and achieved much loftier scholastic heights than some of our brightest students TODAY. And they did it without the "help" of any ISTEP+ testing.

We used to call it a DESIRE TO LEARN, and that will supplant any "device" that society can toss at anyone, save death itself. And I always love to say that a student has to BE IN CLASS to learn, so that can skew figures, and does not even touch on "poverty". Nobody learns by OSMOSIS...you can't hold a book against your head and know it all in a minute. That dog just won't hunt!

MY slant to all this would be in either INCLUDE all those "x-factors" that can possibly affect scoring, OR...revise the current test to reflect more of the curriculum, taking into account the aforementioned factors.

Either way, it will produce something the current system might be lacking in....accuracy AND accountability, not just for the school systems, BUT more importantly, for the STUDENTS.

It's something to consider.

Have a safe weekend.