I find it interesting when District Local Report Cards come out in August and newspaper writers and local citizens try to interpret all the information contained in the eight page document. Education is a complex business and when you over simplify the analysis you end up getting a distorted view of the truth.
There are four distinct elements that contribute to a school's rating. The first element that was introduced was getting 75% of your students to pass the various state tests given in grades 3-8 and 10. This initially sounds like a reasonable goal, until you look deeper. Schools found that to ensure success, they needed to concentrate their efforts on the kids in the middle. Those who had the potential to pass but for whatever reason had just missed the mark. No need to be concerned with the best students - they would pass easily. The lowest performing students would require too much time and money and besides, the model would allow you to let 25% of your students fail and still be called a success. Obviously this is a very limited way to look at how schools deal successfully with all their students.
So we introduced another dimension to the District Report Card - the Performance Index. This measure was added to encourage schools to seek improvement from ALL students and reward that effort. Each student who takes the test is given a numeric score based on their level of performance.
0 points if you don't take the test.
0.3 points if you get a "limited" score. (lowest level possible)
0.6 points if you get a "basic" score. (higher than limited but not passing)
1.0 point if you are "proficient".
1.1 points if you get an "accelerated" score.
1.2 points if you get an "advanced" score.
These points are then averaged across the district and then multiplied by 100 to get a Performance Index. So the school is rewarded for moving any child to a higher level. You will notice that the numeric reward is higher for increasing the lower levels than the higher ones. We can argue whether that is fair or not but at least we now have an incentive to work for the improvement of all the students.
The third measure comes from the federal government and not the State of Ohio. This is the Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) measure. The word "progress" in the title is a little misleading. It really has little to do with progress. The goal for the feds is that states not overlook their various minority populations. Technically you could look satisfactory or even great on the previous two indicators and may be totally ignoring your special education students, or your poor students, or your ethnic minorities. So the two goals of AYP are that you must measure and show the same success in these different groups as you do in your general population. I personally think that is a good thing but the second part of AYP says that by the year 2014, ALL schools must have a 100% passing rate for ALL
students. Now have you ever known a test that is worth taking where everyone gets 100%? Nice goal but totally unrealistic. AYP is the product of the Elementary & Secondary Education Act (ESEA) also commonly referred to as No Child Left Behind (NCLB). This law which has historically been supported by both Republicans and Democrats will hopefully be revised and re-authorized soon to provide some better goals.
The fourth measure came from challenging schools that said passing achievement tests is not a fair measure. It has been documented time and again that students from more affluent families and communities will score higher than their counterparts in low income and impoverished families and communities. Some teachers look good because they are blessed with good students and not because they teach well. Some very good teachers look bad when they do a fantastic job but have students that are so far behind that they could not possibly catch up in one year.
Value Added was first made popular by Dr. Bill Sanders in Tennessee. Instead of measuring the students against a passing score, the students are measured by their progress when compared to all of their peers in Ohio. My simplified example is to line up all the students from the best scores to worst scores after taking a test, say the 4th grade mathematics test. What matters is not "Johnny's" score but rather where he is standing in line compared to everyone else. The next year after everyone learns some more mathematics and taking the 5th grade mathematics test, we line everyone up again. If "Johnny" is still standing in about the same place, he did as we would expect. If he moved up in line a significant amount we would say that he performed above expectations. Why? Maybe
his school, his teacher, his parents, or he just decided on his own to get to work. We can't know the why but we do know it was a good year for him. If he moved back in line a significant amount then we say he performed below expectation. Again there could be lots of reasons but the result is that is was not a good year.
By looking at the average of groups of students instead of individuals we can come to conclusions about the effect the teachers and/or the school had on students. What is interesting about value added measures is that success or failure has almost nothing to do with the economic status of the community, school, or family. This measure is fairly new and is the least understood. Like all the measures previously mentioned it gives a limited view of the total picture. All of these measures combined can give a more complete picture of the ability of a school to perform in a way we would expect.
I hope this explanation has helped broaden the picture a bit about school performance. Realize that even these points do not fully encompass the complexity of the process we call education and the places we call school. Schools with great reputations have weaknesses and schools with poor reputations have strengths. Sometimes you just have to look a little deeper than the surface.
Authors Note: Since completing this article an important resource has been updated. In the past, an application called Measure Up was invaluable in helping people understand all the data contained in the District Report Card. This application has advantages over the paper report because it is in full color, it is interactive, and it includes much better descriptions about the data that just couldn't fit on a paper document. Please take a few minutes to go to this web site and more fully investigate the data from your school - or any other school in Ohio. The web address is: http://measureup.edresourcesohio.org
Carl Jones, Director of Curriculum
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