A new coalition is urging the state to keep hard academic indicators front and center when judging schools — a counterbalance to some options state officials have been exploring.
Under a new federal law, the Every Student Succeeds Act, states have more flexibility to define what makes a school effective. So far, under the state’s draft guiding principles, officials appear eager to explore new options for rating schools, and committed to “multiple measures of progress and growth.”
But a policy brief released Tuesday by Education Trust and co-signed by a dozen advocacy groups, strikes a different tone. Its first principle — “make the main thing the main thing” — implores state officials to keep their eye on academic achievement and look at a “limited” number of other indicators.
“There have been a lot of conversations about standards and about assessments and about how we measure the effectiveness of schools,” said Ian Rosenblum, the founding executive director of EdTrust-NY. “We believe that if we don’t establish strong expectations for all students … then we’re not going to be able to improve equity and opportunity to students.”
This brief is part of a larger battle over the direction of state education policy. Though state officials have signaled a willingness to rethink policies that rely heavily on standardized test scores, groups like Education Trust caution there is danger in straying too far from current indicators.
Here are a few key areas of the report, which you can read here.
Do not adopt too many accountability indicators. The policy brief urges the state to use the “fewest possible” indicators and to “heavily weight” English and math proficiency. It offers some alternatives to academic indicators, such as chronic absenteeism or student suspensions, but emphasizes standard academics over “multiple measures.”
Do not replace overall school ratings with a “dashboard.” The policy brief argues that each school should have one overall rating, even if it is used in addition to a set of other measures to judge schools. The recommendation comes one week after the state’s Board of Regents listened to a presentation from Stanford professor Linda Darling-Hammond, who expressed support for a “dashboard” approach to rating schools, closer to New York City’s current system, which breaks ratings down into components.
Ensure that academic measures together represent 75 percent of each school’s rating. That percentage is key to making sure the state remembers “what matters most” when evaluating students, the report says. In its draft guiding principles, the state did not specify how much academic indicators might be weighted in each school’s rating, though all states are required to give academic factors the most weight under the law.
Include college and career readiness as a new indicator of school quality or student success. The report suggests judging schools based on enrollment and success in advanced classes. That’s not far from the state’s guiding principles, which also reference having access to advanced classes, and possibly rating schools based on how students succeed in postsecondary education.
Officials are still in the process of putting together a set of recommendations. “These are draft guiding principles which we have been seeking comment on; they are not yet official Board of Regents policy,” a said a State Education Department spokesperson in an email. He added that “all academic subjects” would be part of the accountability system, along with “non-academic measures of school quality and student success.”
The state has convened a think tank with dozens of organizations to get input from education leaders across the state. Rosenblum said his coalition intentionally released its report before any state measures were finalized.
We “wanted to do it before the Regents put out their initial framework because we wanted to provide input in the process,” Rosenblum said. “I think it’s too early to know for sure where the state is heading.”