GUEST VIEW: Do school accountability ratings mean anything?

In late May and early June, nearly five million Texas school children ended another academic year, and began their summer vacation, with report cards in hand. Whether it was a “letter grade” or a “numerical grade,” the report card was, for virtually every student, a fair and accurate accounting of how that child performed in language arts, mathematics, science, history, foreign language, fine arts, and other subject areas.

Now it’s about time for the Odessa school district, and more than 1,000 other public school systems statewide, to receive their annual “report cards.” State Accountability ratings, compiled by the Texas Education Agency, will be released on Friday, July 29. Federal Accountability ratings, compiled according to provisions of “No Child Left Behind” and the U.S. Department of Education, will be released a week later, on Thursday, August 4.

But will those ratings really tell us anything about how well — or how poorly — Odessa schools actually performed in 2011-2011? No, I don’t think they do.

Accountability Ratings were created by the Texas Legislature and the U.S. Congress, ostensibly to provide parents and taxpayers with a fair, easy-to-understand measurement of how schools were performing. Both systems are based, largely, on how students perform each year on the Texas Assessment of Knowledge & Skills, the TAKS, but the data are “sliced-and-diced” in different ways, sometimes leading to different conclusions. Sometimes, they are drastically different conclusions.

Under the current state system, districts, and their individual campuses, can receive a “grade” of Exemplary, Recognized, Acceptable, or Academically Unacceptable. (There are several other possibilities, typically associated with unusual local conditions.) With federal ratings, the two categories are simply Met Adequate Yearly Progress or Missed Adequate Yearly Progress.

As is too often is the case, the devil of school accountability is in the details. It now takes nearly a ream of paper — actually, about 440 pages in all — to print the two manuals that the state uses to fully explain the state and federal accountability systems to school administrators. To the average citizen, it probably makes
about as much sense as the calculus that the college football hierarchy uses to create its Top 10 national rankings, and to schedule
post-season bowl matchups.

Several years ago, an Austin area high school — one that is consistently rated among the nation’s best by Newsweek — was awarded a Recognized rating from the state; just one week later, it received a Missed AYP designation from the federal government. Such conflicting results, released within days of one another, no doubt cause parents and the public to question the validity of the ratings systems, the amount of time that’s spent preparing for state tests, and the cost involved.

The upcoming 2011 Accountability Ratings are destined to produce even more public skepticism. Why? Because in calculating this year’s state ratings, TEA will not apply the controversial Texas Projection Measure, a complex student growth projection that allowed many districts, and their campuses, to receive higher ratings in 2010 than would otherwise have been the case. 

Nor will TPM be applied to federal ratings, so it’s very likely that an increased number of districts, and their campuses, will miss AYP too.

Since the state changed the rules this year, to make the system much harder, results in 2011 will undoubtedly appear worse to the public than what was reported last year, even though teachers and students worked just as hard — if not harder — than they did in 2010, when the schools received overwhelmingly positive ratings. So what, if anything, will these poorer ratings tell us about the quality of the teaching and learning that’s actually taking place at any given school? Frankly, not much.

We are a society that is drawn, increasingly, to communicate with the 140-character stroke limit of Twitter. That’s not good enough when it comes to talking about student achievement.
This year, perhaps more than ever before, district administrators owe it to parents and the community to provide a much fuller accounting of how all students performed — by subject, by ethnicity, by socio-economic status, and by campus. We don’t need labels. One or two words don’t tell us anything worth knowing about the quality of the education that our students received.

Andy Welch retired on June 30, 2011, as Communication Director for the Austin Independent School District. He previously worked as a reporter at the State Capitol, and as a Communication Officer for both the Texas Department of Agriculture and the State Comptroller of Public Accounts.