Next week a special committee of diverse stakeholders assembled by the Kentucky Department of Education will begin defining and setting parameters for the state's new school accountability rating system, which will use one to five stars to communicate each school's overall performance. Social media has flickered with discussion about the ratings, with some educators and others complaining that a system that "judges schools based on test scores" is unfair and does not convey all the components that make up a successful school.
Critics are right that the overall star rating fails to convey a lot of important information. But dismissing the system altogether seems to reflect a misunderstanding about why the accountability system exists and what it seeks to accomplish. In this post I'll argue that the rating system is extremely important, but actually does not carry the kinds of negative consequences or repercussions that so many educators seem to fear. We need to use the star rating as a starting point for intense, community-based conversations about what is going in our schools and how they can get better, and we need to stop blaming poverty so often on the results we're getting.
My thoughts below, which represent my views alone, build heavily on a two-part post I wrote in 2017 when the current accountability system was in development, on what "education accountability can - and cannot do" (link here to part I and part II).
How we got here: School ratings are not a new thing
First, a bit of background: Kentucky has had a school rating system since the advent of the Kentucky Education Reform Act in 1990. While the terminology has changed a bit over the years, the system has always drawn on multiple measures of student achievement (mostly, but not entirely, based on a combination of annual standardized test scores) to convey school performance. The previous system rated schools as "distinguished," "proficient," or "needs improvement." Under federal education law, the worst performing schools in the state are required to receive additional supports from the Kentucky Department of Education.
The latest version of the accountability system emerged as a result of changes in federal law (called the Every Student Succeeds Act), and was approved by the Kentucky Board of Education in August 2017. The new system measures student achievement based on the following metrics:
- Proficiency - a measure of how many students are performing at grade level in reading and math in grades 3-8 and 10 (weighted 35% of a school's overall performance in elementary and middle grades, 45% in high school).
- "Other" academic indicator - a measure of how many students are performing at grade level in science, social studies, and writing in grades 3-8 and 10 (weighted 26% of a school's overall performance in elementary and middle school and 15% in high school).
- Growth - a measure of how far students are advancing from one year to the next in reading and math (grades 3-8 only; makes up 35% of schools' overall performance rating).
- Transition readiness - a measure of how well students are prepared for post-secondary education and careers (high school only; weighted 30%)
- Graduation rate - high school only, weighted 6%
- A yet-to-be-determined measure of the quality of school climate, slated to be introduced in the 2020 testing cycle, which will eventually account for 4% of schools' overall performance (this metric was included by an act of the state legislature in 2018).
Weights for each of the above metrics were recommended to the Kentucky Board of Education last year by a Standards Setting Committee made up teachers, administrators, and community leaders from across Kentucky. Schools did not receive an overall rating for 2018-2019 because we needed a year's worth of data to inform the standards-setting process that will establish the definitions and cut points for schools at each of the 5-star levels of performance. That's the work the Standards Setting Committee will take up again on August 23. I will also serve on this committee, as I did last year. The committee will first establish a definition for what schools generally are like at each of the 5-star levels. Then on September 4-5 the committee will convene again to establish cut points for each of the levels, making sure that the profile of schools that fall within those cut points actually matches the description of each performance rating. When last year's student performance results are released to the public, likely in October, schools will also receive an overall star rating for the first time based on these parameters.
Why - and how - school ratings matter
So why is all this important? For starters, the public has a right to know how our schools are doing. Based on the public investment in education, we should know roughly what percentages of our students are reading and performing math, social studies, and science at grade level, how minority students, students of poverty, and students with disabilities are doing relative to the overall student population, whether students are generally learning a year's worth of material for every year they are in school, and if they are performing below grade level, whether they are making progress catching up. We should know what percentages of our students demonstrate some measure of readiness for life after graduation. Testing instruments are not perfect, but they are still the best tools we've got for assessing some of these metrics at a large scale.
We need to be able to communicate to parents and the public in fairly simple terms how their schools are doing overall. That's the purpose of the 5-star rating. But as I told the Bowling Green Daily News earlier this week, a ton of really important information - the kinds of specific measures I describe above - is sometimes lost in that rating. And so the star rating should only be a starting point. We should be able to draw some fairly broad, but valid, conclusions about a school based on its star rating, but beyond that parents and the community should dive into the specifics of how their school is doing, and they can do that through the newly enhanced school report card, which will present in user friendly ways areas in which a school may actually be excelling, or in some cases struggling, that their star rating doesn't fully convey.
The consequences of the star rating: An opportunity for improvement
Some educators seem to think there are dire consequences in store for them based on their school's star rating. But this just isn't the case. There are precisely zero state- or federally-mandated consequences for schools based on their rating, with the one exception that schools in the bottom levels of performance have to develop and implement a plan to improve student learning (something that the public should naturally expect), and schools with the most critical levels of under-performance will have to work with an outside team of educators or consultants to assist them with their turnaround efforts (something that is mandated by federal law, but is also a proven practice for school improvement here in Kentucky).
Will people compare schools based on their star rating? Will they make (perhaps superficial) judgments about a school that is a 3-star school in comparison to a 4-star school? Of course some will. But I believe no one is making such comparisons with as much anxiety as educators themselves, who don't seem to realize that nothing whatsoever will happen to them if their school is rated with 3 stars versus 4. As I've written previously, the entire point of the system is to help shine a light on each school and help educators and their stakeholders understand what each school is doing well, and where it needs to focus its improvement efforts.
That's good and vitally important work, especially in a state where overall less than half of elementary and middle school students are proficient in math, and just over half are proficient in reading. There is so much room for improvement. I'm happy to talk about all the nuances of student learning that test scores can't convey once we've made marginally more progress in these large scale measures of achievement. Until then, the accountability system exists for one reason - to inspire local communities in a conversation about how schools can get more students to much higher levels of academic proficiency.
And improvement can be made. Of course poverty plays a massive and sometimes negative role in student learning. But as the "Opportunity Myth" research from TNTP demonstrates, in far too many classrooms students are still not being challenged with rich, grade-appropriate learning tasks. There are many reasons for this, from poor curricular materials, to ineffective intervention systems, to gaps in teacher training, to low expectations for students of poverty and students of color. But when schools make a concerted effort to focus on better assignments, stronger instruction, deeper student engagement, and higher expectations, student achievement accelerates and achievement gaps close dramatically.
How that works out in individual schools might vary widely from community to community, but that's the point of the entire accountability system: to foster a rich, local conversation about how the kids are doing in our schools, and how we can make a bigger impact. That process of improvement is long-term and, when done right, won't necessarily yield immediate changes in student test scores or overall school performance ratings. But we're not here simply to bump a school's star rating year after year; we're in this for the long haul, to steadily improve student learning so that collectively the next generation can have a chance at economic success and a free and happy life. School accountability is only an information tool, but an extremely important one, on that journey.
Usual disclaimer: Views expressed on this website are mine alone and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of anyone affiliated with Western Kentucky University (where I am professor of educational administration, leadership, and research) or the Kentucky Board of Education (where I am a member and serve as chair of the Curriculum, Instruction, and Assessment Committee).
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