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Dayton Daily News education reporter Scott Elliott writes about schools, kids, teaching and learning.
Home > Blogs > Get on the Bus > Archives > 2006 > September > 05 > Entry
Learning from Piqua
If there’s one thing that struck me most while reporting today’s story about income and test scores, it was just-retired Piqua Superintendent Jerry Clark talking about how common it was for him to see kindergarenters who didn’t just have the usual problems of not knowing their letters and numbers.
These kids had never seen a crayon before. They had never held a book or been read to.
In essence, they were starting five years behind other kids sitting in the same classroom. Now that’s a challenge for a teacher and a school.
Today’s story had its roots in some musings here at Get on the Bus not long ago. That got me wondering just how strongly income and test scores were connected in Ohio and what that said about the fairness of our state’s system of evaluating schools.
Now we know the connection is very strong, and that the state is looking for new ways to evaluate schools.
I didn’t get as much from Clark or about Piqua into the story as I would have liked, but this small, poor city in a mostly rural corner of Miami County is a good example of how hard the work can be for schools to make a noticeable difference when it comes to state report cards, even when they are helping kids learn.
I’ve been interviewing Clark for about a decade, talking to him about the challenges of educating kids in cities like Piqua. This is a town with a lot of proud, hard working people who care about their kids. But some of the poverty there is extreme. For the schools, change took time, it took focus, it took community support and a lot of hard work. Finally, this year’s state report card ranked Piqua “effective” and when you look at the rest of the state you find very few examples of a school district ranked as low as Piqua for median income with an effective rating.
But the frustration for Clark was holding together his base of support year-after-year and keeping people believing that the road they were on was the right one. People are understandably impatient when it comes to their kids and the quality of their education and every year report cards came out saying Piqua was among the worst around.
Ohio’s system set the bar, for most tests, at 75 percent passing. That was a long road for Piqua. For years, Clark was looking at data and other results that told him Piqua was improving, but it’s hard to keep people believing when the state keeps ranking the district near the bottom. It made it tougher to pass levies and occasionally stirred political unrest for school leaders.
In recent years, Ohio has moved toward a middle ground. Those 75 percent passing rates are still required but districts now can get a nudge up the rating scale if they show strong improvement. Right now the “growth” measure the state uses is not very sophisticated. Essentially it looks at how well districts move their average scores up.
With next year’s new value-added system, Ohio hopes to track the test score changes of individual kids and quantify growth by student, classroom, school building and school district. It’s a very sophisticated system that some experts are not even sure will work. Clark, for one, is hoping it does.
One of the experts I spoke to for the story told me that for an individual student the “who they are” influence of their family background usually accounts for 30 to 40 percent of their individual test score results. That means the teacher generallly can influence up to 70 percent of their test result through “what they learned.”
But when you aggregate individual students together in large groups it becomes much harder to move the overall passing rates. The “who they are” side of the coin influences the overall percentages much more strongly. The education holy grail is finding a way to measure “what they learned” for large groups on a wide scale.
Permalink | Comments (2) | Categories: Testing
Comments
By Oldprof
September 6, 2006 11:24 AM | Link to this
To lend some data to Mary’s theorizing: Ohio performance reports for higher ed. show that graduates from poor families earn less than equivalent grads from well-to-do families. Education alone rarely moves an individual from poverty to wealth. However, for the low-income graduates, the different is tangible: the child of a family that got by just below the poverty level gets to be several thousand above it—and the next generation generally benefits from that middle-class status.By Mary
September 5, 2006 3:50 PM | Link to this
One of my theories is that children and families in an impoverished or even a middle class background sense a stacked system of haves and have nots no matter how well they perform, so why bother. I think some article in a publication (maybe a commentary about the Economist about a year or so ago) gave some credence to a staked economic system in our country for job and educational opportunities sort of like a caste system. Also, some of the kids’ parents are so totally overworked to make ends meet and put food on the table, there is no time or energy for coloring sessions. They are exhausted. But it seems day care or other sitters would be offering crayons in lieu of television from time to time. Maybe the story about crayons is overly dramatized by the principal or superintendent when it might have been a rare case.