School ratings? Get real!

     A while back, a comment to this blog asked if I want to start some kind of crusade. Not at all. I just want to entertain a little and have some fun.
     If I were to choose to begin a crusade, though, it would concern the state accountability ratings for Texas schools. These ratings – released just last week for 2009 – give little indication of a school’s actual quality. Our state leaders know this, and it really pisses me off that they don’t push for a more accurate system of evaluation.
     Teachers, school personnel and parents of students see first-hand the failings of the accountability ratings. My crusade would be to make sure EVERYONE knows about this fiasco, so that the ratings would be treated with the skepticism given to tabloid gossip instead of accepted like the word of God.
     A couple of Eagle Pass ISD examples will make my point. Shortly after it opened as an 11th-12th grade campus, C.C. Winn in one year moved its rating up simply by insisting that students be retained at EPHS unless they had met all of the requirements for promotion to Winn. Winn, overall as a school didn’t change one iota, and its rating improved. What changed? The student body (slightly).
     More recently, Liberty Elementary dropped from being exemplary, second best in the state (according to Texas Monthly) blah, blah, blah, to not even being the best or even second best elementary in Eagle Pass. Very little changed there over that time as far as the teaching, curriculum, administration, etc… to sink their high standing. What changed? The students.
     At least 90 percent of a school’s rating depends on the quality of the students coming in, the neighborhoods they come from, and their income levels. It’s not fair that after all the TAKS scores get analyzed, the reports all say “Travis High received an unacceptable rating.” This gets into people’s heads as “Travis High is an unacceptable school” when sometimes low performing schools are fine schools with just too many students whose lives are unacceptable.
     I would like for the announcements to say, “Travis High students performed unacceptably this year in the areas used to rate their campus.” This would help remind people that the campus ratings rely upon student actions that aren’t totally under their school’s control – that the ratings are more a measure of the quality of the students than a measure of the quality of the school.
     School districts, for the most part, are big bureaucratic behemoths where change evolves very slowly over decades. Little changes year to year in the classrooms. Yet the accountability ratings continuously fluctuate. That’s another reason that they are unreliable. If the ratings were trustworthy, how could a school continue doing everything the same and be exemplary one year but recognized the next, failing one year but acceptable the next.
     Further, you absolutely can’t compare one year’s rating to another to judge whether a school got better or worse over time. One reason is that TEA each year breaks out the fudge-o-meter to figure out how to make the tests harder without failing an unacceptable number of schools. For example, they might lower the number of questions that a student must get correct or they might change the rules so that more students’ scores can be exempted.
     Most recently TEA’s chosen fudge factor was the Texas Projection Measure. After factoring in TPM, the number of schools rated exemplary in Bexar County more than doubled. So, on paper the San Antonio area schools showed an incredible improvement in one year. In reality, they changed very little.
     Here’s the Express-News explanation of TPM: “The TPM gives schools credit for students who fail their Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills if the student appears to be on target to pass in the future. It uses a student's current year test scores in several subjects as well as a previous year campus average score to project the student's future test performance.”
     The newspaper also made this statement: “Educators are hailing the new tool as a way to give credit for progress over time.”
     That’s absolutely untrue, as TPM is much too simplistic to measure “progress over time.” All it does is compare two numbers to assume whether a student will score higher in the future. If the low score’s not far from passing, and the school has done well in general, the school’s rewarded because supposedly the student will pass the next time around. Really, it’s just another example of how “close” can count in things other than just horse shoe pitching and hand grenade tossing.
     Instead of predicting future progress, TEA should be examining the student’s actual progress over time. If a student comes into a school two grade levels behind and finishes the year only one grade level behind, then the school should get credit for that in spite of maybe low TAKS scores. Some teacher groups have pushed for this type of system, but too many politicians prefer the current unfair black and white system that says you’re “passing” or “failing” – there’s nothing in between and progress means nothing.
     I hope that teachers keep striving for a process that produces ratings close to reality, because we shouldn’t keep punishing acceptable schools for simply having unacceptable students and we shouldn’t keep rewarding average schools simply for their dumb luck of having exemplary students. Again, I’m sure some people know this is happening. Please help spread the word so that EVERYONE knows it is happening.