State board decision might impact performance trend lines in Jefferson County audits

WFPL reports that last week the Kentucky Board of Education voted to allow Jefferson County Public Schools to largely substitute their own, self-initiated audit for a standardized, state-conducted audit required under the rules of the federal School Improvement Grant/Persistently Low-Achieving Schools process.

What is actually proposed is for a state audit team to create a “crosswalk” report that uses the findings from the Jefferson County report instead of on-site visits whenever possible.

That might be problematic. While Jefferson County’s own curriculum audit was extensive and appears to have great value, the format used and the metrics reported are not the same as those used in the standardized state audit program. It may not be easy to create a derivative report in the format used by the state’s own audit process.

As a result, determining the real trends over time as Jefferson County attempts to improve its poorly performing school system may become obscured. That is a potentially serious problem that could undermine the ability of both policymakers and the public to determine if real progress is actually being made since the last audit was conducted in 2010.Jefferson County actually conducted several different, self-initiated audits recently. The report mentioned in the state board’s “Staff Note” about the waiver request is a curriculum management audit.

However, another closely related audit was also recently released. This one is titled “Organizational Structure and Central Office Staffing, Functions, And Operations.”

This second report is very lengthy, but some of its findings seem to overlap the issues examined in the standard state-managed leadership assessments.

I don’t think either Jefferson County report will be easy to compare to the last state-conducted audit of Jefferson County, the “Jefferson County Public Schools, 04/11/2010 - 04/16/2010, District Leadership Assessment Report.”

For one example, the state-conducted leadership assessment reports have nice summary metrics like this one (click to enlarge) that allow easy tracking of progress over time. There is nothing similar in the audits Jefferson County conducted on its own.

One thing is certain: translating one education report into another format is always a challenge.

Also, I think the state audit team is going to have to look at both of the recent Jefferson County audits to cover all the areas involved in the state audit.

To be totally fair, if a good “crosswalk” can be conducted, it will save a lot of staff hours in Jefferson County. The Staff Note mentions that the state audit team that will do the “crosswalk” will have the option to do on-site visits to cover areas that are not sufficiently discussed in the Jefferson County sponsored audit. This places a lot of responsibility on the audit team to insure that trend lines are protected.

In the end, there may not be much time and effort saved. In fact, the state auditors may have to spend even more time than usual first reviewing the Jefferson County audits and then doing site visits if they find areas of the standard state audit are not adequately addressed by Jefferson County’s self-conducted reports.

Will the waiver approval lead to a loss of trend data and thus transparency in Kentucky’s largest school district? Only time will tell.