Accountability puzzle

Over at the Prichard Blog, Susan Perkins Weston discusses some puzzling material that is part of the Kentucky Board of Education’s agenda package for its meeting tomorrow. This material is called the “Kentucky Accountability System, Long Term and Interim Goals for Public Reporting,” and it includes a series of tables like the one below that show projected, year-by-year score goals for different student groups in different school levels and subjects for the period from 2018-19 to 2029-30.

KY Long Term and Interim Goals Table for HS Math

Strangely, there is no explanation offered for these tables, and while they might seem straight-forward at first, as Ms. Weston points out, that simplicity fades away quickly once you examine the tables more closely. Then, as Weston points out, all sorts of issues arise.

Weston covers the problems nicely, but I’ll just add one key additional point. The tables start out with “Baseline” scores for 2018-19. The problem here, of course, is we have not even seen the test results from 2016-17 at this time. Where did the Kentucky Department of Education come up with those baseline scores for tests that are still two years away?

Also, given the strange way some of the numbers work, do these tables make any sense? As Weston points out for the table above, the Kentucky Department of Education says that it will be just fine if our high school math proficiency rate way out in 2029-30 is only 49.7 percent! Really?

There are plenty of other issues concerning the state’s new school accountability system that have yet to be resolved, which we and other groups have mentioned before.

I don’t really think anyone will know how the new system works until we get real data from the 2018-19 school year to examine, and that is, of course, still two years away. Meanwhile, while the state board certainly can vote to continue the progress, I don’t see how they will be able to adopt an enforceable regulation for the accountability system anytime soon.