Do New School Report Cards Reveal Something Worth Knowing or Are They Just Statistical Magic?
Texas has released its statewide grading of public schools, using a grading scale of A to F. The grades would appear to be a reflection of school poverty levels than anything else. The Texas Tribune’s analysis shows that “No school district with a rate of low-income students lower than 30 percent received an overall rating of C, D or F.” And as the level of poor students in the schools increase, the letter grades become more variable, but the clear trend is that letter grades substantially decline. Almost the entire cluster of Cs, Ds, and Fs is with schools with poverty rates in excess of 50%.
This data poses crucial questions and possibilities. First, is the variability in letter grades among high poverty schools an indication that the system really is distinguishing between higher and lower quality schools. Second, do schools have any way to predict, understand, and respond to their overall poor performance? If they don’t, this system is no better than the statically teacher evaluation systems that state leaders claimed would magically transform the teaching profession, but which were shown to be pretty much pointless, if not harmful, within just a few years.
Third, even if schools understand these results, do those at the bottom end actually have the resources they need to make change. As research increasingly shows, money does, in fact, matter to student outcomes and it matters a lot. Unfortunately, Texas schools are way short on it. Recent school finance litigation has shown how Texas has been dramatically underfunding its education system. The largest scale snapshot shows school funding is down roughly 16% in real dollar terms in Texas since 2008.
The whole system, however, might be nothing more than voodoo magic. States adopted their new rating systems pursuant to the Every Student Succeeds Act. And as I emphasize in Abandoning the Federal Role in Education,
under the ESSA, states have enormous flexibility in the amount of weight they assign to particular tests and to student achievement factors overall. Not only does this flexibility permit an individual state to minimize the weight it assigns, but it also allows every state to do something different. One state might make student proficiency tests the dominant measure of student achievement while another state uses student growth. And regardless of the approach a state takes, states can assign significantly different weights to tests and other student achievement measures. A state might, for instance, assign test results 95 percent in their accountability metric and any number of non-test factors 5 percent or less collectively. Another state might assign test results 60 percent in its accountability metric while assigning 40 percent to softer factors, such as student engagement, teacher engagement, and school climate. With a number of options, states will have the ability to manipulate their accountability systems so as to produce desired outcomes.
None of the foregoing means to suggest that testing is an effective means to promote equal education opportunity or that some optimum weight should be afforded to test results. The point here is that the ESSA maintains the NCLB’s notion that there is merit to testing and accountability, but undermines its own premise. If testing and accountability are plausible tools for achieving equality, leaving states’ testing regimes to random variability undermines equality. Rather than tracking a single proficiency standard as in the NCLB, the ESSA affords disadvantaged students educational opportunities that more closely track the approach of their home state rather than any mandate in statute. In this respect, the ESSA does little to continue the Elementary and Secondary Education Act’s historic mission to promote improvements in academic achievement for disadvantaged students."
It seems to me the overarching problem is that we don’t really know if the system is a statistical sleight of hand, a reflection of inadequate funding, or a reflection of socio-economic segregation (which is the biggest driver of student achievement). And if we don’t know that, then these report cards cannot really tell us anything worth knowing—even if the underlying data and method is right on target. In other words, transparency is worth its Continue reading: Education Law Prof Blog
