Imperfect list of ‘worst’ schools
State education officials are still tinkering with the list of 188 of the “worst” schools two days before the State Board of Education is required to approve it.
The continued delays in completing the list and uncertainties about a federal improvement program have frustrated school district officials. They may not know until the state board votes on Thursday whether some schools they’ve already told to expect drastic interventions will actually have to go through with them. Some superintendents are arguing that their schools shouldn’t have been put on the list in the first place.
They may be right; there are quirks in the methodology. But making the list could be viewed as an opportunity, not just a label of failure. Each school will be entitled to between $150,000 and $6 million over three years, depending on their size and improvement strategy.
In return for the money, districts must pick one of four jarring strategies:
- Closing down the school;
- Converting to a charter school;
- Firing the principal and teachers, with the option of rehiring no more than half of the staff; and
- Transforming it – a broadly defined option that would include a longer school day.
The federal government is requiring that states designate the 5 percent of “persistently lowest performing schools” that can pursue federal school improvement money – $415 million over three years in California’s case.
Since January, the state and federal departments of education have been sparring over which schools should be included. Finally, on Monday, the state released a preliminary list of 188 schools on the list. They include 183 schools with low percentages of students proficient in English language arts and math (here and here) and five high schools with a graduation rate of less than 60 percent. The schools on the list have faced sanctions under the federal No Child Left Behind law. Some have changed principals and curriculums already. But this marks the most determined effort by the federal government to turn around schools that for years, if not decades, have been immune to improvement. What’s not been proven is whether the four strategies chosen by Secretary of Education Arne Duncan will work.
In releasing the list on Monday, state education officials said that they weren’t finished revising it and that several dozen schools, high schools and middle schools from this list, may be replaced. The state’s still struggling to get the parameters right because of imprecise criteria imposed by the feds and the Legislature. Two schools in San Jose’s Alum Rock Union with API scores above 700, for example, can’t reasonably be labeled among the state’s worst middle schools.
Complications with the criteria
One complication is that the Legislature exempted all schools that increased their API scores 50 points over the past five years. That’s not a high bar, and apparently a bunch of very low-performing schools – the state hasn’t said how many – got off the list that way. The state then included schools with students more proficient in English and math but whose API hadn’t grown 50 points.
All of the schools on the list are either Title I schools – low-income schools that receive federal anti-poverty aid – or middle and high schools that were eligible for Title I money but, by their districts’ choice, don’t receive it. Adding the lowest 5 percent of those schools to the list, as the feds required, also apparently ensnared some higher performing schools. San Jose Unified Superintendent Don Iglesias, who has two middle schools on the list, plans to complain to the state board about the disparities created by the methodology in a hearing this week.
As the Los Angeles Times pointed out, the state’s list of 23 Los Angeles Unified schools doesn’t include a half-dozen schools that the district had designated as warranting a takeover, including Garfield and Fremont high schools. No district can have more than 10 percent of schools on the list.
Schools on the list will have until June to apply for the federal money and then start the restructuring this fall. However, because the state has delayed the list until now, some districts may be precluded from closing the schools, converting to a charter or requiring teachers to reapply for their jobs. Choosing those options could require handing out layoff notices to teachers in those schools, and the last day to do that, under state law, is Monday, March 15.
Schools on the list technically aren’t required to seek the federal assistance, and so could escape doing anything, at least for a year if not, in theory, indefinitely. But turning aside the money that might not again be available would probably be foolish. The feds or the Legislature will likely close the loophole in the law to make restructuring mandatory not voluntary.
The federal law is also unclear whether this will be a one-time or annual list of failing schools and what will be required to exit the intervention program.
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John, thanks for an accurate and insightful description of the “persistently low-achieving schools” list for the federal School Improvement Grant program, particularly the complication caused by the low “recent growth” standard (50 API points over 5 years) used to construct the list.
There is a simple remedy to the use of a low growth standard — instead, use the well established growth target system from CA’s API system [that is, 5 percent of the difference between the initial API and the statewide goal of 800]. This growth standard would result in a “recent growth” criteria of 75 to 100 API points for most of the lowest performing schools in the state, and provide for far fewer exclusions of very low scoring schools [thus substantially reducing the number of higher achievement schools on the list]. The SBE acting in concert with the SPI have the statutory authority to do this via SBx5 1 (Steinberg).
Also, your last sentence on exit criteria from the program is important. Good identification criteria also include program exit specifications. The fact that state and federal law do not require exit criteria does not prevent the SBE from following good practice and establishing exit criteria on their own. A logical exit criteria would be when a school improves such that they now longer qualify for the “persistently low-achieving schools” list that is computed on an annual basis, then the school has the option of leaving the program at the beginning of the following school year [thus forfeiting funds from the program and allowing those funds to go to schools still on the list].
Doug McRae
Retired Test Publisher
Monterey, CA
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It’s true that this list is erroneous. Just to check, I sorted SFUSD high schools by API, and the consistently lowest-API school (and dropping year by year), June Jordan, is not on the list. Higher-API (and improving) schools like Philip and Sala Burton are. I haven’t had time to do this quick check with middle and elementary schools yet. If the entire list is this error-ridden, shouldn’t it be pitched and redone? … And that’s not to address the proposed solutions, either. As charters do not show higher achievement than comparable district schools, why would that be a solution? Why not just require that the school be painted blue, since that has no less impact than converting to a charter school?
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Just to be clear, Caroline. The state used a different measure than the API to come up with its list: the percentage of proficiency on the CSTs in English language arts and math, so there would not be a direct correlation with API. However, the Legislature then ordered schools with an API growth of 50 points in five years to be pulled from the list. That’s a weak measure of progress and created some of the problems. However, you are right that once you see schools in the second and third decile, with relatively high API scores, on the list, you can safely bet that they aren’t in the lowest 5 percent and probably shouldn’t be on the list.
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So do the charter schools that made the list have to convert to public schools?
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Gah! One would think with our redundant layers of education leadership (SPI, SBE, CDE) that new legislation would take into account things many of us saw looming. Flawed bills pass and unintended consequences have real consequences for kids.
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It’s interesting, though, because when you’re familiar with the schools in the district, you can see how off-base these lists can be. For example, one of the SFUSD schools (Phillip and Sala Burton High School) on the list is ALREADY the focus of a special project (New Day for Learning, funded by the Mott Foundation) aimed at replicating features of the renowned Harlem Children’s Zone there — providing a wide set of social services and support to the students and their families. So are they required to tear the school apart despite — and undermining — the work that’s already going on?
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Caroline and John are both correct that using another metric to check on the validity of the statutory-based metric used to construct the “persistently low-achieving schools” list released by CA yesterday is a reasonable thing to do. One of the standard ways to check the validity of educational tests is to use another test intended to measure the same thing to establish validity — it is called “concurrent” validity and has been widely accepted as a good way to check validity since tests were introduced to schools 80 years ago. Using API data such as Deciles to check the validity or credibility of the method used to construct the “persistently low-achieving schools” list has solid educational measurement justification. Having schools in API Deciles 3-4-5-6 on a lowest 5 percent list constructed using other metrics just doesn’t pass the sniff test . . . . . Doug McRae, Retired Test Publisher, Monterey
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Great post as always, John. Thanks!
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I learned (by asking a school board member) that small schools are not included on the hit list. That’s why the persistently lowest-performing high school in my district, San Francisco Unified, isn’t listed, and higher-achieving schools are. It also meant that many low-performing charter schools aren’t on the list, because they tend to be small.
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