Teachers Are About to Get the Data They Need to Educate Your Kids, Experts Say
Nine big-city schools in California, covering almost 1 million kids, are trying to break away from "one size fits all" teaching.
When President Barack Obama signed the new Every Student Succeeds Act earlier this month, many school leaders, education advocates, and policy makers of all stripes rejoiced. The new law replaces the troubled No Child Left Behind Act and, for the first time in almost 20 years, gives states much more flexibility to design their own grading systems and make their own decisions on how to improve struggling schools. Under NCLB, school quality was measured primarily by the results of standardized test scores; the ESSA encourages states to use multiple measures, including at least one non-academic metric like student feedback about their schools and teachers.
Now that the bill is signed, state educators are starting to try to figure out what these new measures of school quality might look like. But a group of nine school districts in California have already been quietly tinkering with a new school grading system of their own. In 2013, a collaborative of nine of the biggest school districts in California—in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Fresno, Garden Grove, Long Beach, Oakland, Sanger, Santa Ana, and Sacramento—got permission from the federal government to create their own formula for grading and improving schools. The timing was perfect, since all states are now scrambling to find more sophisticated models for measuring schools at a time when state funding is in short supply.
"I think what these districts are doing is pioneering work that's really innovative and experimental," said David Plank, the executive director of Policy Analysis for California Education who has been working closely with the CORE districts, as they are known. "CORE is trying to create a system that's looking at schools deeply…including social and emotional learning."
So, what's new in the CORE school report cards?
Better academic data: Like the old system, what CORE calls the "School Quality Improvement Report Card" will still include academic factors like test scores in math and English and graduation rates. But CORE is working with a group of Stanford researchers at the John Gardner Center for Youth to make this data more useful for principals and teachers, according to Rick Miller, the executive director of CORE. For example, the state collects student attendance data, but right now that data only shows how many kids are going to school every day on average. "You might have 99 percent of students attending," Miller said, "but in fact there are six kids who are chronically absent." The new data will be able to point out to teachers the specific students who are consistently missing school, so the teachers could investigate the root causes behind absences and try to address them.
The state also collects high school graduation rates, but many students drop out in middle school. CORE is now collecting this information, as well as highlighting the names of individual students who are not on track to graduate on time.
Most states don't have the funds to create more sophisticated data collection systems. But CORE saw that there was a lot of data already available; it just wasn't always accessible.
Stronger equity lens: CORE's new school grading system also goes beyond the current federal requirements on reporting data by subgroups such as race, English-language proficiency, poverty, and special education. The collaborative breaks up Teachers Are About to Get the Data They Need to Educate Your Kids, Experts Say | Mother Jones:
