Pa. school test results woefully incomplete
Pennsylvania's Department of Education released a massive new system Friday for evaluating public schools, but its own performance on how it executed that release was viewed as lackluster by some local school officials.
Newly defined performance scores were excluded for more than 600 of the state's 3,000 public schools, including charters, because of concerns about potential errors on one measure, the Keystone Exams. Coding problems prevented student growth from being calculated.
As a result, 20 percent of schools statewide received no overall score. Among those were 177 middle schools, high schools, and charter schools in the Philadelphia region, including all the high schools in the Philadelphia School District.
Also for that reason, the state delayed a feature on the website that would have allowed the public to compare schools.
"If the goal was to give parents a way to assess the quality of their schools, they certainly have missed the mark at this point," said Christopher McGinley, superintendent of the Lower Merion district. "The details of the system were not thought out and clearly were not ready for prime time today, or there wouldn't be all these holes."
No one could accuse him of sour grapes. Although Lower Merion's two middle schools could not be scored, the rest of the
By The Numbers
By The Numbers
The Pennsylvania Department of Education has launched a new accountability system for public schools called the School Performance Profile. Schools were given a 0-100 score based on more than the standard requirements from No Child Left Behind.