Big huge thanks to
Zach Mezera, reporter extraordinaire, who attended the City Council Education Subcommittee meeting last night and sent along this detailed, thoughtful report. What follows is Zach's excellent report verbatim - all thanks go to him.
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Education Subcommittee Hearing — July 23, 2012
Relevant
players included Councilmembers Zurier, Salvatore, Matos, and Principe;
Superintendent Lusi; Chief Academic Officer Paula Shannon; and Director
of Research, Planning and Accountability Marco Andrade
As the Superintendent put it, the new
classifications that came with the waiver from NCLB provide more
flexibility, but are more difficult to explain to the public. I’ll do my
best.
Over half of the District is now “identified” for poor performance.
This happened because there was a shift away from identifying schools
solely by AYP, and instead toward measuring multiple factors. These are:
percent of students with proficiency, percent of students with
distinction, percent of NECAP participation, achievement gap closing,
progress to 2017 targets, growth (K-8), improvement (9-12), and
graduation rate.
The measurement of achievement gaps merits special
attention. From what I understood, there are three relevant measures: 1)
The average score of students with an IEP or LEP (limited English
proficiency); 2) The average score of students on free or reduced lunch
(and minority status?); and 3) A district-wide “performance reference
group” of students without any of the prior qualifications. So take Hope
High: average the scores of IEP/LEP students in the school, average the
scores of FRL students in the school, do something with those two
averages, and then compare that school average to the average score of
non-poor, non-IEP students across the entire district, and voila, the
“gap-closing” score. [Interesting to note here that RIDE refers to this
“performance reference group” as “high-performing” when actually, the
PRG has nothing to do with performance. It’s a tacit admission that not
having an IEP and not having subsidized lunch pretty much suggests the
student is scoring well.]
Whereas the NCLB goal was to have all students
(read: all schools) reach proficiency by 2014, the waiver sets more
realistic goals for individual schools, based on a baseline. AYP then,
as I understand, is a thing of the past, superseded by what Andrade
called “a more comprehensive picture.” The classifications that are
rendered by this more comprehensive process then dictate whether the
school/district must reform with various options from a menu of
“empirically proven reform strategies.” Superintendent Lusi stressed
that what was better about this system is that by creating a system for
measuring gaps, the suburbs are now held accountable as well. Although,
not too many were identified in the lowest tiers anyway.
One that was ID’d as “Focus” that probably caught
peoples’ attention was Nathan Bishop. The primary reason for this, it
seems, was that only 9% scored proficient (in what?) in the most recent
NECAP. The RIDE rules state that if a school has a proficiency score of
less than 10, it automatically is placed in Focus regardless of other
scores.
Some things are still unclear.
1) If
the reforms take almost a year to implement (this Spring or later), and
then NECAP testing happens at the beginning of the following year, the
test will fail to measure the full impact of the reforms for at least 2
years. It’s just another dumb side effect of having NECAPs at the
beginning of the year.
2) How are
the affluent white suburbs measuring achievement gaps? — I asked this
question, but was still confused by the response. Rather than calculate a
“low performing performance reference group” for places like Barrington
or East Greenwich as I thought it might, it instead seems like RIDE
made the “quorum” for measurement arbitrarily low. In the past, schools
(or districts?) needed to have 45 students with IEPs or LEPs or FRL to
be scored for gaps; now that number seems as low as 10. That means gaps
should be able to be calculated for most schools, but it’s based on a
sample of 10 situationally-challenged students that is likely too small
to overcome natural statistical variation. I.e., the rankings of
achievement gaps across the state are calculated on the backs of a very
few FRL, IEP or LEP students in affluent districts.
3) How
disruptive are these reforms going to be? We have to wait until the
package is chosen. And because the district is mandated only 60 days to
choose a package, the community won’t have many chances to engage in the
process.
4) How is
baseline calculated? Is it NECAP scores over the last few years? Or is
it just the most recent full set of scores for the school, a la RI-CAN’s
criticized report cards? I hope it’s the former, but the phrasing
members used made it sound like the latter.
5) How are
we going to pull this off? Credit to Councilmember Principe, who
pointed out the core problem: PPSD only receives an additional $400,000
to enact reform packages at an additional 15 schools! It’s insane.
