Is Selective Admission A School Improvement Plan?
The Washington Post reports that parents and alumni of D.C.’s Dunbar High School have quietly been putting together a proposal to revitalize what the article calls “one of the District’s worst performing schools.”
Those behind the proposal are not ready to speak about it publicly, and details are still very thin, but the Post article reports that it calls for greater flexibility in hiring, spending and other core policies. Moreover, the core of the plan – or at least its most drastic element – is to make Dunbar a selective high school, to which students must apply and be accepted, presumably based on testing results and other performance indicators (the story characterizes the proposal as a whole with the term “autonomy”). I will offer no opinion as to whether this conversion, if it is indeed submitted to the District for consideration, is a good idea. That will be up to administrators, teachers, parents, and other stakeholders.
I am, however, a bit struck by two interrelated aspects of this story. The first is the unquestioned characterization of Dunbar as a “low performing” or “struggling” school. This fateful label appears to be based mostly on the school’s proficiency rates, which are indeed dismally low – 20 percent in math and 29 percent in reading.
As we’ve discussed many times, however, raw proficiency rates are one means (albeit a distorted means) of describing student performance on tests, but they tell you almost nothing about the performance of a school. Dunbar students enter the school performing well below the district average, and so overall rates might remain low even if the school is remarkably effective in boosting performance (to the reporter’s credit, the Post article actually mentions this). This is why growth-based measures, though themselves incomplete and not without their limitations, are a much more fair and valid means of approximating actual school performance, as they are geared toward measuring