Failing schools list on Monday
The state Department of Education has now set Monday morning to release the list of 187 or so “persistently lowest performing schools” that the federal government insists must be restructured. That will allow districts and independent analysts only two days to review the list – and pehaps lobby for changes – before the State Board of Education votes on the final list at its March 10 meeting.
The Legislature set the criteria for determining the list in the bill it passed in January to improve the chances of winning a Race to the Top grant. There are enough quirks, however, that it’s possible that some of the worst performing schools will escape the list, while better performers will face sanctions.
The state board has the final say; that’s why it’s been important to make the list public. But the Department of Education has said since January that Washington has disputed the methodology. Only this week, it said, has the list been nailed down, and districts begun to be notified.
Districts will be given four options for a school on the list: close it, invite in a charter school, fire the staff and rehire no more than half, 0r “transform” the school through a longer day and other structural strategies. Any of the actions is an important last resort for a chronically bad schools, but most districts would rather avoid them.
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It is important to note that we have no idea how much learning is occurring at these “persistently bad” schools. The children at these schools may be experiencing relatively good gains in achievement–greater gains, even, than schools that are considered successful. However, because the children at these schools entered school very, very poorly prepared, the school will nonetheless be labeled “bad.”
On the other hand, very little learning may be occurring at these schools. We simply do not know which scenario is the true one. Therefore, current school reform efforts put the cart before the horse. First we need a good measure of student learning, ideally based on year-to-year growth in achievement of individual students. Only after we have a good measure of student learning can we truly label a school as “bad” or “good,” and take the steps necessary to improve the truly low-performing schools.
Of course, before imposing a transformation on a school, it would be wise to have reason to believe that this transformation will be effective. As this blog entry notes, there is little evidence that any of these transformations can make a difference. But that’s another matter altogether . . .
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A “school system” is made of students, teachers, administration and parents. It isn’t just made of teachers and administrators. As long as we evaluate parts of our system and not the system as a whole, we will maintain an inaccurate picture of its difficulties. The “adult” approach is to evaluate all parts of a failing system, and doesn’t scapegoat when convenient.
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As a former member of the California Longitudinal Pupil Achievement Data System Advisory Board (”CALPADS”, enabling legislation first enacted in 2002, but implemented only last October), Eric Larsen’s comment is not only accurate, but exposes the fallacy of attempting to assess the efficacies and efficiencies of education reforms (or any other education inputs) based on traditional cross-sectional or status metrics (i.e. comparing last year’s 4th graders’ end-of-year achievement scores to this year’s 4th graders’ end-of-year scores).
Not mentioned but implied in Mr. Larsen’s comment are the effects of student mobility, which is typically much higher in so called “low performing schools” and distorts school-wide scores (i.e. when higher achieving students transfer in replacing lower achieving students who have left, or vice versa). More perversely, high student mobility burdens almost every education input from curriculum, pedagogies, instructional strategies, etc. to how many free and reduced price lunches need to be made each day.
“What gets measured gets done” (often attributed to management guru Peter Drucker) works only when progress toward specific objectives is measured and compared over time. Truly transforming schools in the face of the current budget crisis will require maximizing the efficiencies of resource allocation decisions, including making program cuts that will have the least effect on learning rates, especially for seriously underperforming students. Transformational reforms may or may not work, but we’ll really never know without longitudinal measures.
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