New report highlights problems with Kentucky school performance ratings
12/11/2013
How can a school be labeled "Distinguished" and yet have serious achievement gaps and other performance problems? Last week the Bluegrass Institute for Public Policy Studies (BIPPS) released a new report highlighting such contradictions in Kentucky's "Unbridled Learning" school accountability system. The report deserves the attention of Kentucky educators, but also taxpayers, parents, and especially legislators and policy makers because it exposes major flaws in the way schools are labeled for performance.
The report, authored by BIPPS education analyst Richard Innes, examines schools at the elementary, middle, and high school levels with the largest Black-white achievement gaps. Turns out that many of these schools also had the state's highest performance rating last year ("Distinguished"), even as some of them were also labeled a "Focus" school - meaning a school whose past - and current - performance is so poor as to justify state-level intervention. In some cases, schools with large achievement gaps were labeled "Needs Improvement," but had no "Focus" school designation.
The source of these contradictions lies, in part, in the more complex systems Kentucky uses for calculating school performance since the advent of Senate Bill 1, passed in 2009, and the federal No Child Left Behind waiver, granted in 2010. These changes have made school achievement gaps a much smaller portion of the overall achievement formula, as compared to the accountability mechanisms under NCLB. While I generally favor the multi-faceted approach to accountability calculation, this change has had the effect of masking serious achievement gaps in some schools.
But the core problem with Kentucky's labeling system, as the BIPPS report illustrates, is that these labels are based purely on percentile rank of each school on the overall accountability score - in others words, how schools compared with each other, rather than how they performed relative to specific improvement targets. Schools in the overall 90th percentile or higher will be labeled "Distinguished." Schools in the 70th to 89th percentiles are called "Proficient," but this is a major misnomer, because the schools have not necessarily demonstrated that students are proficient in particular subjects - only that the the school's overall performance on all measures beat out 7o% of other schools.
Likewise, schools below the 70th percentile are labeled, "Needs Improvement," but this says nothing about what specifically needs to be improved. If such schools do "improve" by this measure, it is only at the expense of other schools.
This system is unfair to schools and confusing and misleading to the general public. I concur with the report's recommendations that the labeling system needs to be revised to ensure that schools not making progress against specific performance targets cannot be designated with the highest rankings.
You can read the entire report here.
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