MA retools ratings system - In bid to jibe with ESEA
Education Week
Andrew Trotter
December 11, 2002
With its recent unveiling of new performance ratings of schools and districts, Massachusetts marked the launch of an effort to merge its home-grown accountability system with the requirements of the federal "No Child Left Behind" Act of 2001.
But the new ratings are causing some confusion, in part because schools that were praised by the state education department two years ago were placed on its watch list this year for failing to meet their targets for "adequate yearly progress."
--SNIP--"We had a classification system that relied on absolute performance, and now it has the overlay of a federal system that includes a performance factor as well as its expectation for yearly improvement," said Paul Reville, the director of the Pew Forum on Standards-Based Reform, located at Harvard University's graduate school of education. The two systems do not dovetail easily, he said.
Under the Bay State's new rating system, schools and districts receive separate ratings for absolute performance and for progress. At the unveiling of the so- called "Cycle II" school and district ratings on Nov. 25, state officials lauded the gains made on the MCAS in English/language arts-and slight gains in mathematics-over the past two years.
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The ratings are based on students' MCAS scores for grades 4, 7, 8, and 10 in English/language arts and math for 2001 and 2002. Of the 1,630 schools that received performance ratings-which ranged from "critically low" to "very high"-59 percent rated "high" or "very high" in English, and 25 percent rated "high" or "very high" in math.
Three-quarters of the schools also received improvement ratings, which compare their MCAS results in 2001 and 2002 with their performance in 1999 and 2000. The other schools were considered too new or small to produce improvement ratings.Overall, of the 1,326 schools that received improvement ratings in English, 83 percent were at or above their targets for improvement; of the 1,265 schools that were rated in math, 55 percent were at or above their targets. Districts also are subject to the state ratings. Of the 320 rated districts, 94 percent were at or above their targets in English, and 76 percent were at or above their targets in math.
Under the new ratings, 194 schools are on the state's watch list, of which 95 are on the list for the second time. The original watch list, published in 2000, had 259 schools.
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