Kevin yesterday posted a nice piece on Colorado's innovative new strategy of rating schools both by the percentages of students who meet the state's achievement standards in math and reading (required by NCLB) and by individual student achievement gains over the course of a school year (a "value-added" approach).
Combining the two school-rating strategies is the only way to accurately reflect schools' contributions to student learning while preserving the law's commendable commitment to getting low performers up to proficiency and giving schools meaningful incentives to improve the achievement of all students.
Doug Harris of the University of Wisconsin-Madison and I discuss the two-track accountability concept in a commentary we did for Education Week a couple of weeks ago.
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This is actually the approach taken by New York City, though no one would know because they aggregate the results into one grade, which is what all the fuss is about. But look beneath the surface and 60% is growth, 25% is absolute performance, and 15% is parent/teacher/student satisfaction. And this year they added a grade for each element in addition to the overall grade.
Obviously, you are under no compulsion to respond to this question. But it is equally obvious that that sort of chart is valuable, but only if you disaggregate magnet from neighborhood schools.
So, I'll try again. Wouldn't your models be much more valuable if we differientated between magnet and neighborhood schools? Can't you understand why high poverty neighborhood school educators won't trust your proposed models unless you distinquish between schools that cream versus those that don't?
A fundamental principle of data-driven accountability is that you get what you measure. Magnet and neighborhood schools are two COMPLETELY different critters. We who can't cream need the best practices of less challenged schools, but those practices will remain useless until we create conditions comparable to those that they can create in magnet schools. So if you measure by the same models, you'll get the same policies, and they will continue to fail in neighborhood schools.
Again, you are under no obligation to answer. But if you want to help high poverty neighborhood secondary schools, people need to articulate these obvious truthes.
Its so obvious to those of us who actually teach in inner city schools. Why are outsiders so reluctant to acknowledge the obvious?
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