November 2, 2007

Brace for the Progress Reports

Filed under: Education NYC DOE Testing by Maisie @ 4:49 pm

The individual School Progress Reports, the ones that grade each school A to F, will probably be made public Monday, after a month’s delay for what appeared to be a cooling-off period. Even so, expect fireworks.

The Daily News reported this morning that principals, who have had the reports a couple of weeks now, are “yelling and screaming.” The Post says the principals’ union, CSA, will not endorse the reports unless the DOE addresses their “inaccurate” data. Since the Progress Reports are the basis of new principal bonuses, that could be a problem.

The delay was explained as giving the principals a chance to review the data. But that had to be a tough task for principals. The data are individual test scores for each and every student, in math and ELA, over two years, “normed” on a scale, calculated several ways, and put into a weighting formula that is quite complex.

In addition, rumors were rife that the $80-million ARIS computer system, where the data reside, kept freezing up when administrators tried to access it. And the sheer time required to review all the data is an issue. As one teacher commented, if a principal must choose between reviewing mountains of numbers or putting out the fire in the boy’s bathroom, he/she is going to head to the bathroom every time.

The DOE, meanwhile, believes it has hit one out of the park. “These progress reports are the glue that holds together our entire” reform plans, Chancellor Klein told the Post’s Yoav Gonen. “What this is, is truly a ‘knowledge-is-power’ system.”

These reports do one thing right: they measure progress, not just absolute achievement levels. For schools that do well by large populations of struggling students, the reports may bring long-delayed recognition (not to mention cash for their principals). That is because the reports measure test-score gains from one year to the next. Even if a student does not score at Level 3 or above, he or she gets the credit for moving, for example, from a low Level 2 to a high Level 2, as they should.

The reports also make a small effort in the direction of using non-test-score measures. Attendance rates and the recent Learning Environment Surveys count a little (15 percent) towards the school’s final grade. Many would argue they should count for more.

So the Progress Reports are at best a work in progress. Will teachers and parents, as well as principals, trust that the data are accurate? If they don’t, they certainly won’t be able to swallow their school’s “C,” say, when they know 75 or 85 percent of their kids meet standards or are heading to college. And they must have some sense that the formula is fair, even if they don’t follow it completely.

For example, “progress” is given twice the weight of absolute test scores–should it be more? less? And schools are assigned “peer” groups that they are measured against. Do their assigned peer groups make sense? Finally, the grades are assigned by quota this year: 15 percent As, 40 percent Bs, 30 percent Cs, 10 percent Ds and 5 percent Fs. That will change next year, but it has a sense of arbitrariness this year.

As any teacher would tell her students, a grade is just one grade. It’s a mistake to make it the be-all and end-all. There are a hundred valid ways of measuring knowledge and they cannot be boiled down to a single number, or letter, no matter how the DOE may report it. Hey, this too shall pass.

3 Comments »

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  • The “peer group” concept - as applied by Tweed - is off the wall. In partcular, as I understand it, no two schools will have the identical peer group - each will be measured in a universe of forty which will change from school to school.

    Further, the cohort will be calculated under the following rubric:
    a) 40% - Title I percentage.
    b) 10% - ELL percentage
    c) 10% - IEP percentage AND
    d) 40% Black & Hispanic percentage.

    Given that NO consideration is given to “achievement gap” data, the heavy weight attributed to Black and Hispanic populations - totally separate and apart from the weighting of impoverished populations is (at least in elementary schools) totally unfathomable.

    Tweed seems unaware that in in the Age before Klein, the Bd. of Educ. maintained statistical ratings of schools based on “Student Need” levels. Those twelve levels were determined by:

    a) Title I population - 60%
    b) ELL population - 20%
    c) IEP population - 20%

    Accordingly, under the new rubric, differences in ELL and Special Ed populations are given 1/4th the consideration in determining “peer group” status, respectively, that race/ethnicity gets. Thus, under Tweed’s Brave New World, schools that largely share RACIAL similarities are increasingly the ones that are compared to each other - sort of a “separate but equal” approach, I guess. How Progressive!

    Comment by Harringtonian — November 3, 2007 @ 6:46 pm

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