School accountability causing squirming in Harlan County Schools
Kentucky School Test Scores Dropping Graphic
The Harlan Daily Enterprise reports “School accountability raises major questions.”
At least, that is what is happening in the Harlan County School District.
Among other things, the district is unhappy with the way the new program rates schools using a norming process rather than setting a specific performance criterion. Under this norming process, results from as many as five separate calculations based on test scores and graduation rates are mixed into one final school grade. Then all the schools get ranked for that final grade.
Those schools that fall below the 70th percentile for their final score will be classified as “Needs Improvement.” Thus, regardless of performance, 7 out of 10 schools in Kentucky are going to be rated as needing improvement.
Actually, given present school performance, even selecting the 70th percentile may be excessively undemanding.
Except for some really top-performing high schools in Kentucky, the percentages of students being adequately prepared for the mathematics required for college and careers isn’t very impressive even for the 70th percentile school.
Looking at the 2012 mathematics performance of Kentucky’s 11th grade students on the ACT, for example, the 70th percentile school, East Jessamine High School, only prepared 41.9 percent of its students well enough to be likely to avoid taking remedial math courses in college. You have to look above the 84th percentile to find schools that prepare even half of their students adequately for college and career requirements in math.
Only eight high schools in the whole state prepared two-thirds of their students adequately in math in 2012. Out of 230 high schools, that is above the 96th percentile!
I also got a big chuckle out of the article.
The Harlan County Schools crowd speculated that the mounting pressure for public school accountability is coming from the charter school movement. Ha, ha, ha!
I attended a ton of advisory committee meetings and Kentucky Board of Education meetings while the new testing system was in development. I don’t recall seeing any other charter school proponent in the room. And, I was never invited to speak during the meetings. I am pretty confident that pressure for the new program due to charter school influence was never mentioned even once.
One last point: The article talks about Harlan County crowing about improving their high school graduation rate from 63.23 percent to 71.6 percent. Basically, those are Harlan’s figures for 2010 and 2011 in the latest available graduation rate report.
The district says that should contribute to a “very good score” in the high school graduation rate part of the new assessment program.
That might actually happen. With proficiency rates from the new K-PREP tests likely to run around 30 percent or so, adding in a factor of 71.6 will look good.
However, the statewide average graduation rate in 2011 was only 78.0 percent. Harlan County’s rate was well below state average, and that statewide average isn’t nearly good enough, either.
If Harlan actually gets a boost from that sort of performance, this will highlight a clear problem with the graduation rate calculation in the new state school accountability system. The fact that the school system is happy to get a boost from such performance indicates problems aplenty.