Education Leaders React to School Report Cards
Thursday, April 12, 2012
While state and local educational officials have mixed views on the statewide school report cards offered this week by RI-CAN, none seem prepared to accept them as the final word on the state of learning in Rhode Island’s classrooms.
From teacher union officials to state Elementary and Secondary Education Commissioner Deborah A. Gist, and the staff of a local charter school. the Rhode Island school community agrees that the task of improving student learning must encompass more than percentages and letter grades.
The new report cards, announced Tuesday by the education reform group, rely heavily on the October 2010 and 2011 New England Common Assessment Program (NECAP) testing scores, broken down by overall school performance, subgroups of low-income, African-American and Hispanic students, by year-to-year improvement in each class, and achievement gaps between white non-low-income students and their minority and low-income peers.
Maryellen Butke, RI-CAN’s executive director, said the report cards offer an easily understandable picture of where students in each school, and their community as a whole, stand and where they need to improve.
The top spots in most rankings were dominant by suburban school systems in better-off towns like Barrington, East Greenwich and Portsmouth, which have traditionally scored well on standardized testing, with urban districts bring up the rear in many cases.
The “cull” lowers Providence public school numbers
To the surprise of few, Providence public schools fared poorly, occupying the basement spots in most of the main categories and subcategories. Both the established and recent alternative schools languished near the bottom of the rankings, while Classical High School, which siphons off many of the city’s most academically advanced public school students, and the charter schools fared somewhat better.
At rock bottom were Charlotte Woods and Mary E. Fogarty elementary schools, which scored Fs in overall achievement, low-income/African-American/Hispanic achievement, and performance gains. Due to their extremely high percentages of minority and low-income students (95 and 85 at Woods, 99 and 85 at Fogarty), they were not graded on achievement gaps.
That harvesting of the top students from neighborhood public schools severely waters down the numbers, said Frank Flynn, American Federation of Teachers vice president for Rhode Island.
“Any time you cull the best kids in the city, like Classical does, it’s going to affect the results. I’m not sure inherently you can use any of these value-added metrics when you allow the most capable students to test into schools,” he said.
Advocates and opponents of RI-CAN’s efforts and NECAP testing agree parental involvement is a crucial ingredient in student achievement. One reason charter schools score higher on testing, said Flynn, is that children are there as a result of parental involvement.
“If (students) aren’t motivated, the parents certainly are when they’re entering a drawing to get their children into a charter school,” he said.
Flynn felt the methodology used by RI-CAN, placing a high emphasis on test scores, does not accurately reflect the effort being put into teaching in urban districts.
“I’m not sure that RI-CAN is objective enough to come out with anything that isn’t self-serving,” he said.
One charter school’s not a fan
While some critics of RI-CAN feel its findings are biased toward charter schools, one has already delivered strong criticism of the report card system.
GET THE LATEST BREAKING NEWS HERE -- SIGN UP FOR GOLOCAL FREE DAILY EBLASTThe Learning Community, a Central Falls-based K-8 charter school that also takes students from Providence and Pawtucket, delivered a stiff rebuke on its website. The 530-student school, with 76 percent of its student body from Spanish-speaking homes, criticized the study, its methodology, and even its calculations, even though the school finished in the top 10 in seven of 14 indicators.
“The methodological deficiencies of the RI-CAN report cards render them at best useless and, at worst, harmful to our state’s efforts to support the education of every child,” it said.
The school’s statement also said the RI-CAN study lacked context and other statistics available on the state’s Information Works! Website, did not weight subgroup scores on the number of students in each group, and was unfair to urban schools.
“We are also distressed that at a time of limited public resources, RI-CAN has chosen to create its own faulty system instead of working collaboratively with the state and other education advocates to get the real data about the real challenges and successes in our communities in the hands of citizens,” said the TLC statement.
Gist developing RIDE’s own measurements
The R.I. Department of Education is developing its own set of measures as part of its strategic plan, “Transforming Education in Rhode Island,” Gist said in a prepared statement yesterday.
Gist said her department has submitted a plan to the U.S. Department of Education to revise its own set of standards using both state and outside sources.
“Under the revised system, we will evaluate all schools based on a number of factors, including proficiency and distinction levels, progress toward closing gaps between student groups, the rate of progress toward targets, growth or improvement over time, and graduation rates (for high schools),” she said.
More information beyond the NECAP scores is necessary to provide an accurate picture of the state of Rhode Island education, said Gist.
“Although the information in the RI-CAN report cards highlights the strengths and the shortcomings of many of our schools, the R.I. Department of Education does not rank schools or provide letter grades based solely on the results of a single state assessment,” she said.
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