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Ellen Belcher is the Dayton Daily News opinion pages editor. She writes about state government, education, the environment, higher education and all things Dayton.
Martin Gottlieb is an editorial writer and columnist for the Dayton Daily News opinion pages. He focuses on the political process itself and does such national issues as war, the economy, taxes and Social Security, as well as a hodge-podge of local and state issues.Home > Blogs > A Matter of Opinion > Archives > 2009 > September > 03
Thursday, September 3, 2009
Editorial: Ohio needs better report cards
Ohio should junk its school report card rating system.
Report card ratings have evolved to a point where they don’t give Ohioans straightforward, useful information.
Put simply, the rating categories have seen so many add-ons in recent years that some of them have completely lost their meaning.
Is it really possible that only one district in the state (Youngstown) qualifies for the lowest rating of “academic emergency”?
How can Dayton rate a full step higher than Youngstown (it’s in “academic watch”) even though its Performance Index Score — a measure of test performance across all grades — is virtually the same?
Or how about this: Marion City Schools, located about an hour north of Columbus, is in “continuous improvement,” but it meets none of the state’s 30 standards for test scores, attendance and graduation rates. Also in “continuous improvement” are Lebanon and Kettering, each of which met all but one of the standards.
The report card is trying to do too much.
Two years ago, Ohio began giving extra credit to districts for testing gains year-to-year, and it also started penalizing those that failed to meet expectations for test score growth. These factors have pushed ratings down — and, in other cases, up — in ways that are both unfair and confusing.
In fact, the growth measure — called the “value-added score” — is difficult to understand altogether and is based on a professor’s secret, copyrighted formula.
Trying to measure the impact of a school or teacher on student test scores is a good idea, but doing so is tricky. And the effort shouldn’t distort how a district is doing overall.
There also is the sticky issue of “adequate yearly progress.”
The federal No Child Left Behind law requires school districts to track “minority” groups, including racial and ethnic minorities, as well as low income and special education children. If those kids don’t keep up, federal sanctions can kick in.
This has good effects. It forces districts to pay attention to kids who, in the past, were overlooked. Ohio has attempted to incorporate its own sanctions for missing “adequate yearly progress.” If, for example, minority groups consistently fail to keep up, a district can be knocked down on the report card. That’s what happened to Kettering and Lebanon.
The problem is, some of these add-on sanctions result in districts getting ratings that suggest that they’re seriously troubled schools. That makes it harder for parents and the public to make sound judgments. Is a family shopping for schools getting good information if it concludes Lebanon, meeting 29 of 30 state standards, is essentially performing the same as Springfield, which meets just four benchmarks?
Both districts rank in “continuous improvement.”
An overhauled report card should be far simpler. Concepts like AYP and value-added scores should be built-in and have a purposeful effect on district ratings. The oddly named categories — what does “continuous improvement” mean anyway? — should be dumped in favor of something more straightforward, perhaps just an A-F grading scale or a 1 to 10 rating.
This next time around, the state should settle on a system that will work for more than a few years and then leave it alone.
NOTE: Dayton’s performance index score is 70.8 while Youngstown is 70.2, the two lowest scores in Ohio. This editorial previously stated incorrectly that Youngstown was higher.
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