Are There Low Performing Schools With High Performing Students?
I write often (probably too often) about the difference between measures of school performance and studentperformance, usually in the context of school rating systems. The basic idea is that schools cannot control the students they serve, and so absolute performance measures, such as proficiency rates, are telling you more about the students a school or district serves than how effective it is in improving outcomes (which is better-captured by growth-oriented indicators).
Recently, I was asked a simple question: Can a school with very high absolute performance levels ever actually be considered a “bad school?”
This is a good question.
For one thing, of course, tests and graduation rates are imperfect measures (especially given how they’re currently used), and so they may be missing a lot. This is certainly the case, but let’s put it aside for the purposes of this discussion.
Say we have an elementary school, located in an affluent neighborhood, whose students score very highly, on average. These kids entered the school way ahead of their peers in poorer areas. During their 5-6 years at this school, each cohort of students maintains a very high performance level, but it’s mostly because of where they started out – they actually make progress that is far lower than that of similar students in comparable schools. Due to the design of most states’ rating systems, this school would probably receive a fairly high grade, or would at least avoid receiving low grade, because the systems tend to weight absolute proficiency measures quite heavily.
Is this wrong? Is this a “low-performing school?”
By the growth-oriented test-based metrics commonly employed in education policy today, including those we use for teachers, yes, it is. These students are “losing ground” relative to similar peers elsewhere (though keep in mind that the estimates from many growth models are relative, not absolute). Sure, virtually all of them will graduate and most