Judging School; ‘Value-added analysis’ would offer a fuller picture
Worcester Telegram & Gazette
September 19, 2004
What are Massachusetts residents to make of the new Department of Education report that more than one-third of all school systems in the state fall short of federal academic benchmarks?
After a decade of education reform costing well over $30 billion, how can that be?
And why are high-performing districts such as Weston and Shrewsbury among 133 labeled "in need of improvement" under the No Child Left Behind Act?
Fifty-one individual schools in Central Massachusetts are among the 384 statewide that missed their benchmark goals for at least two consecutive years, including the nationally recognized Jacob Hiatt Magnet School, Seven Hills Charter School and the Accelerated Learning Laboratory in Worcester.
A variety of factors contribute to the sometimes puzzling ratings.
Determinations of whether a school or district needs corrective action are based on student performance on the state MCAS tests. Using 1999 and 2000 results as a baseline, the state set annual performance targets for each school and district. In most cases, when schools were judged to need improvement, the reason was that one or more subgroups of students often special needs, low-income or minority missed improvement targets.
Not surprisingly, some school officials protested that the report painted schools with too wide a brush. Shrewsbury Superintendent Anthony Bent remarked, aptly, "It's like giving students a test with 18 items and they get 17 right, you give them a D."
Still, thoughtful educators can and should use the report as a diagnostic tool to pinpoint areas in which more emphasis is needed just as teachers use MCAS to identify weaknesses of individual students and of their curriculums.
In one sense, the federal assessment that attempts to track school progress over time is an improvement over the annual reports on districts' overall performance on MCAS tests.
As a indicator of achievement levels for individual students, schools and districts the curriculum-based MCAS tests are as accurate and objective a gauge as currently exists. However, the annual performance snapshots fall short in measuring how diligently and effectively a given district is doing its job.
Hence, public schools in stable, affluent districts where children are exposed to cultural and educational enrichment at home and in the community may achieve impressively high passing rates while simply coasting along. Schools in less affluent communities where there are transient populations and comparatively few enrichment opportunities may exert extraordinary efforts to achieve modest results overall.
To address that shortcoming, educators in Worcester and some other communities are beginning a campaign for a "value-added analysis" system for the state that tracks progress over time and takes into account such factors as student mobility.
One assessment proposal, developed by the Rennie Center for Education Research and Policy at MassINC, would follow the progress of individual students from year to year, resulting in an assessment of student growth that is, the amount of learning students in the school or district gained during the year.
The Rennie Center proposal might prove to be prohibitively complex and expensive, but perhaps a more modest variation on the theme would be feasible. Certainly, consideration by the state Board of Education of ways the current MCAS snapshot of school performance could better reflect schools' effort and effectiveness would be worthwhile.
