The Clark County School District gave itself an "A" for its 2007-08 performance under federal standards, even though the number of schools needing improvement increased over the previous year and the number of schools showing improvement declined. In 2007-08, 186 schools made adequate yearly progress under the standards of the No Child Left Behind Act, 32 fewer than in 2006-07 when 218 schools showed adequate yearly progress. The number of schools on the state's watch list almost doubled, going from 35 in 2006-07 to 66 in 2007-08.
Deputy Superintendent of Instruction Lauren Kohut-Rost emphasized the rigor of the standards Thursday when the district released its annual report. Schools are judged by 37 separate targets. Falling short of just one target places a school on the watch list for failing to make adequate yearly progress. As a whole, the district met 94 percent of 12,987 benchmarks and expects to qualify for a second consecutive year as a district showing adequate yearly progress.
"That's an A grade we're giving ourselves," Kohut-Rost said. "We're extremely proud of the Clark County School District for making AYP for the second year in a row. That's almost unheard of for a very large urban and very diverse school system. So we're incredibly proud of that."
First, it's by no means unheard of for a large urban school district to make AYP two years in a row; most of them in fact are doing so, primarily because district-level AYP rules have been interpreted by states in extremely lenient ways.
Second, the oft-repeated idea that a school has to meet 37 out of 37 separate targets under NCLB (or some number in the same range, it varies a little by state) is for nearly all schools basically wrong. It's true that NCLB creates a two-dimensional matrix for each school crossing two performance measures (math and reading) plus two participation rates (95% of students have to be tested) with multiple student sub-group categories. So, for example, on one axis you'd have the four measures above, and on the other you'd have various student categories (white, black, Latino, asian, native american, low-income, special education, English language learner, all). 4 X 9 = 36, plus one additional measure (almost always attendance or graduation rates) equals 37.
But--and this is the crucial thing--very few schools have enough students to qualify in all 37 categories. For that to happen, a school would have to be large and enjoy some true United Colors of Benneton kind of diversity. In Nevada, subgroups aren't counted unless there are at least 25 students in the school, so to reach the full 37 you'd need at an absolute minimum of 125 (25 times each of the five racial/ethnic subgroups, with that population also containing significant numbers of poor, special education, and ELL students). Probably you'd need many more. Practically speaking, very, very few schools hit every box--and keep in mind, almost half of the boxes are simply test participation measures that have nothing to do with learning.
So a typical school is more likely to have between six and ten real marks to hit: reading and math performance for all students, one or two racial subgroups, and one or two among poor, special ed, and ELL. This is a lot less unreasonable-sounding than 37. It's why, six years into the law and counting, most schools haven't been labeled as failures. It also means that the "12,987 benchmarks" number is in all probability wildy overstated--I'll bet dollars to donuts that's the number of benchmarks against which Las Vegas schools could have been measured in an alternate universe where every single school in Clark County looks like the "It's A Small World" ride at Disneyland, not the number that was actually relevant after knocking out every subgroup under 25.
Third, the quotes from the school district officials illustrate an underappreciated point about the rationale behind NCLB. Holding schools accountable for test scores is usually characterized as a way to impose some uniformity to the education system, to make sure we bring all students up to the same high standards in a global economy, avoid the soft bigotry of low expectations, etc.-- all of which is true. But it's also a way to make judgment external to those being held accountable. That's what makes recent discussions about locally-designed assessments under a new version of NCLB so problematic. It's not so much what locals would be assessing as the fact that they'd be assessing themselves.
And when you give public officials in high-pressure, high profile jobs that kind of discretion, you tend to get responses along the lines of "That's an A grade we're giving ourselves."
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