Print
skynesher/istockphoto.com
California parents have yet another way to assess how their local schools are doing.
The California Charter Schools Association has developed a new metric, called a Similar Student Measure [PDF], to assess how a school's students perform on state tests compared to other schools serving similar students. The measure is used to identify which schools overperform or underperform over a three-year period by comparing a school's Academic Performance Index to a predicted API that controls for the impact of students' background in those schools.
The measure was developed to assess how charter schools are doing compared to regular public schools, but could have wider utility for the majority of schools in California.
Using a complex regression analysis, the measure takes a number of characteristics of the school's student population into account. These include the socioeconomic background of the student body, the average education level of their parents, the number of students with disabilities, the percentage of English language learners, and the racial and ethnic makeup of the students.
By going to this mapping tool, parents can look up any school in the state.
The state currently ranks every school on a "similar school" scale, from one to 10, which assesses how a school does compared to 100 other schools with similar student populations on the state's annual Academic Performance Index.
But, the researchers on this report said, those similar school rankings can fluctuate from year to year. Many schools, especially smaller ones, don't receive a "similar schools" ranking at all.
At the same time, the analysis underscores the limitations of using complex methodological techniques. For those without statistical backgrounds, simply understanding the techniques used is a challenge.
Another limitation is that it places the majority of schools [PDF] – 78 percent – in a single category of performing within 5 percent of their predicted level on state tests. Just under 2 percent of schools performed far below their predicted level, and 1.6 percent far above. Another nearly 10 percent performed just below their predicted level, and another 10 percent just above.
Samantha Olivieri, the charter schools association's accountability manager, said that the purpose of the tool is "to identify schools at the polar ends, those that are far overperforming and those that are underperforming."
"We can say with a high degree of certainty those schools are overperforming or underperforming," she said.
But she acknowledged that the measure is not very helpful in explaining what is happening in the 78 percent of schools that fall into the middle category.
"When you have such a large portion of the school in that category, it does not tell you that much," Olivieri said. "We recognize that as a limitation and hope to be able to do further research, and identify more performance classifications, and identify with more precision additional levels of student performance."
While she acknowledged the important role of a student's background in influencing test scores, she said the report shows that it does not have to be the decisive factor in determining student achievement. "What we find is that many schools, and many charter schools in particular, are proving that background is not destiny," she said.
In particular, she noted, the new measure shows that charter schools are four times more likely to be among the top 5 percent of schools that exceed their predicted test scores – and twice as likely to be among the bottom 5 percent across the state.
At the release of the ratings report last week, the California Charter Schools Association rebutted questions about whether its findings were influenced by the fact that the research was carried out by the association's own staff. Staff members said the work had been reviewed by outside experts, and that the report had been endorsed by U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan, who said it "confronts the successes and shortfalls of California's charters with unblinking candor."
The report does in fact identify a number of low performing charter schools, in addition to higher performing ones. However, the report's greater contribution may be that it could also help identify regular public schools whose students are doing extremely well or poorly on state tests, while taking students' backgrounds into account more than any existing rating system in the state.
Comments
A tool to evaluate charter schools is useful, but the idea that accountability is established by measuring success is like suggesting that a bolt is tightened because you know which socket fits. Measuring success provides useful information, but accountability exists only when the customer (student and parent) have the right of exit AND the opportunity to exit. Charter schools are accountable to their customers because they are schools of choice - customers voluntarily enroll and may voluntarily leave (unlike traditional public schools that enjoy compulsory education laws and government established enrollment areas). Before charter schools existed, the opportunity to exit traditional public schools was afforded only to those wealthy enough to buy their "right of exit."
Beware of anyone who believes that charter schools are an “enemy” – they probably care more about the interest of adult employees of traditional public schools than they do about educating children.
In 2001, my school district, San Francisco Unified, moved to investigate and take possible action on concerns with Edison Charter Academy, a school operated by the then-hailed, now-fizzled controversial, for-profit Edison Schools Inc.
CANEC was deeply involved in what became a nationally publicized brouhaha in which it fought against SFUSD's efforts to hold the school and its then-high-profile operator accountable.
In 2003, SFUSD had to struggle with a tragic situation involving a charter high school, Urban Pioneer, after two students died on an unsupervised Urban Pioneer wilderness outing. Meanwhile, Urban Pioneer had other issues: it was in financial shambles, with teachers going unpaid. It was committing open academic fraud, graduating students with far fewer than the required credits. Its test scores were rock bottom.
When SFUSD moved to deal with Urban Pioneer, CANEC mounted another all-out battle against the district. Urban Pioneer also hired a high-priced damage control consultant, Solem & Associates, despite the fact that its finances were so dire that it couldn't pay its teachers. One would suspect, though of course I can't confirm, that CANEC paid the bill for Solem & Associates.
Those two back-to-back situations in my school district made it very clear that CANEC opposed any accountability at all for charter schools. Could anyone rationally disagree? Yes, CANEC changed its name, or was replaced by CCSA, which does allow CCSA to distance itself from those situations.
If CCSA is an entirely different organization, it can legitimately claim to have supported oversight and accountability from its inception, but it can't deny that other charter advocates fought hard against oversight and accountability before CCSA was founded.
As Ms. Castrejon indicates, I follow many online information sources about education. So she must be aware that I read plenty of commentary from sources who are openly hostile to public education and openly tout charter schools as superior or as the only viable option. It would be hard for anyone who's paying attention to miss that attitude. For that matter, I saw “Waiting for 'Superman',” which should settle that question conclusively. It's a denial of reality to claim that the charter movement does not position itself as an enemy of public education.
The following excerpts are from the introduction to the March 2008 book "Keeping the Promise? The debate over charter schools," a collection of essays published by Rethinking Schools in collaboration with the Center for Community Change.
The introduction was written by education researcher/commentators Leigh Dingerson, Barbara Miner, Bob Peterson and Stephanie Walters.
"The charter school movement has roots in a progressive agenda that, as educator Joe Nathan wrote in Rethinking Schools in 1996, viewed charters as 'an important opportunity for educators to fulfill their dreams, to empower the powerless, and to help encourage a bureaucratic system to be more responsive and effective.'
"...Unfortunately, the charter concept also appealed to conservatives wedded to a free-market, privatization agenda. And it is they who, over the past decade, have taken advantage of the conservative domination of national politics to seize the upper hand in the charter school movement.
"… [T]here are those who view charters as a way to get rid of public schools altogether."
The commentary adds that charter schools "[feed] into the conservative dream of replacing public education with a free-market system of everyone for themselves, the common good be damned."
via Twitter