A Quick Look At The DC Charter School Rating System

Having taken a look at several states’ school rating systems  (see our posts on the systems in IN, OH, FL and CO), I thought it might be interesting to examine a system used by a group of charter schools – starting with the system used by charters in the District of Columbia. This is the third year the DC charter school board has released the ratings.

For elementary and middle schools (upon which I will focus in this post*), the DC Performance Management Framework (PMF) is a weighted index composed of: 40 percent absolute performance; 40 percent growth; and 20 percent what they call “leading indicators” (a more detailed description of this formula can be found in the second footnote).** The index scores are then sorted into one of three tiers, with Tier 1 being the highest, and Tier 3 the lowest.

So, these particular ratings weight absolute performance – i.e., how highly students score on tests – a bit less heavily than do most states that have devised their own systems, and they grant slightly more importance to growth and alternative measures. We might therefore expect to find a somewhat weaker relationship between PMF scores and student characteristics such as free/reduced price lunch eligibility (FRL), as these charters are judged less predominantly on the students they serve. Let’s take a quick look.

Are There Low Performing Schools With High Performing Students?

I write often (probably too often) about the difference between measures of school performance and student performance, usually in the context of school rating systems. The basic idea is that schools cannot control the students they serve, and so absolute performance measures, such as proficiency rates, are telling you more about the students a school or district serves than how effective it is in improving outcomes (which is better-captured by growth-oriented indicators).

Recently, I was asked a simple question: Can a school with very high absolute performance levels ever actually be considered a “bad school?"

This is a good question.

Underlying Issues In The DC Test Score Controversy

In the Washington Post, Emma Brown reports on a behind the scenes decision about how to score last year’s new, more difficult tests in the District of Columbia Public Schools (DCPS) and the District's charter schools.

To make a long story short, the choice faced by the Office of the State Superintendent of Education, or OSSE, which oversees testing in the District, was about how to convert test scores into proficiency rates. The first option, put simply, was to convert them such that the proficiency bar was more “aligned” with the Common Core, thus resulting in lower aggregate proficiency rates in math, compared with last year’s (in other states, such as Kentucky and New York, rates declined markedly). The second option was to score the tests while "holding constant" the difficulty of the questions, in order to facilitate comparisons of aggregate rates with those from previous years.

OSSE chose the latter option (according to some, in a manner that was insufficiently transparent). The end result was a modest increase in proficiency rates (which DC officials absurdly called “historic”).

The Great Proficiency Debate

A couple of weeks ago, Mike Petrilli of the Fordham Institute made the case that absolute proficiency rates should not be used as measures of school effectiveness, as they are heavily dependent on where students “start out” upon entry to the school. A few days later, Fordham president Checker Finn offered a defense of proficiency rates, noting that how much students know is substantively important, and associated with meaningful outcomes later in life.

They’re both correct. This is not a debate about whether proficiency rates are at all useful (by the way, I don't read Petrilli as saying that). It’s about how they should be used and how they should not.

Let’s keep this simple. Here is a quick, highly simplified list of how I would recommend interpreting and using absolute proficiency rates, and how I would avoid using them.

New York State Of Mind

Last week, the results of New York’s new Common Core-aligned assessments were national news. For months, officials throughout the state, including New York City, have been preparing the public for the release of these data.

Their basic message was that the standards, and thus the tests based upon them, are more difficult, and they represent an attempt to truly gauge whether students are prepared for college and the labor market. The inevitable consequence of raising standards, officials have been explaining, is that fewer students will be “proficient” than in previous years (which was, of course, the case) – this does not mean that students are performing worse, only that they are being held to higher expectations, and that the skills and knowledge being assessed require a new, more expansive curriculum. Therefore, interpretation of the new results versus those in previous year must be extremely cautious, and educators, parents and the public should not jump to conclusions about what they mean.

For the most part, the main points of this public information campaign are correct. It would, however, be wonderful if similar caution were evident in the roll-out of testing results in past (and, more importantly, future) years.

Under The Hood Of School Rating Systems

Recent events in Indiana and Florida have resulted in a great deal of attention to the new school rating systems that over 25 states are using to evaluate the performance of schools, often attaching high-stakes consequences and rewards to the results. We have published reviews of several states' systems here over the past couple of years (see our posts on the systems in Florida, Indiana, Colorado, New York City and Ohio, for example).

Virtually all of these systems rely heavily, if not entirely, on standardized test results, most commonly by combining two general types of test-based measures: absolute performance (or status) measures, or how highly students score on tests (e.g., proficiency rates); and growth measures, or how quickly students make progress (e.g., value-added scores). As discussed in previous posts, absolute performance measures are best seen as gauges of student performance, since they can’t account for the fact that students enter the schooling system at vastly different levels, whereas growth-oriented indicators can be viewed as more appropriate in attempts to gauge school performance per se, as they seek (albeit imperfectly) to control for students’ starting points (and other characteristics that are known to influence achievement levels) in order to isolate the impact of schools on testing performance.*

One interesting aspect of this distinction, which we have not discussed thoroughly here, is the idea/possibility that these two measures are “in conflict." Let me explain what I mean by that.

So Many Purposes, So Few Tests

In a new NBER working paper, economist Derek Neal makes an important point, one of which many people in education are aware, but is infrequently reflected in actual policy. The point is that using the same assessment to measure both student and teacher performance often contaminates the results for both purposes.

In fact, as Neal notes, some of the very features required to measure student performance are the ones that make possible the contamination when the tests are used in high-stakes accountability systems. Consider, for example, a situation in which a state or district wants to compare the test scores of a cohort of fourth graders in one year with those of fourth graders the next year. One common means of facilitating this comparability is administering some of the questions to both groups (or to some "pilot" sample of students prior to those being tested). Otherwise, any difference in scores between the two cohorts might simply be due to differences in the difficulty of the questions. If you cannot check that out, it's tough to make meaningful comparisons.

But it’s precisely this need to repeat questions that enables one form of so-called “teaching to the test," in which administrators and educators use questions from prior assessments to guide their instruction for the current year.

DC School Growth Scores And Poverty

As noted in a nice little post over at Greater Greater Washington's education blog, the District of Columbia Office of the State Superintendent of Education (OSSE) recently started releasing growth model scores for DC’s charter and regular public schools. These models, in a nutshell, assess schools by following their students over time and gauging their testing progress relative to similar students (they can also be used for individual teachers, but DCPS uses a different model in its teacher evaluations).

In my opinion, producing these estimates and making them available publicly is a good idea, and definitely preferable to the district’s previous reliance on changes in proficiency, which are truly awful measures (see here for more on this). It’s also, however, important to note that the model chosen by OSSE – a “median growth percentile," or MGP model, produces estimates that have been shown to be at least somewhat more heavily associated with student characteristics than other types of models, such as value-added models proper. This does not necessarily mean the growth percentile models are “inaccurate” – there are good reasons, such as resources and more difficulty with teacher recruitment/retention, to believe that schools serving poorer students might be less effective, on average, and it’s tough to separate “real” effects from bias in the models.

That said, let’s take a quick look at this relationship using the DC MGP scores from 2011, with poverty data from the National Center for Education Statistics.

The FCAT Writing, On The Wall

The annual release of state testing data makes the news in every state, but Florida is one of those places where it is to some degree a national story.*

Well, it’s getting to be that time of year again. Last week, the state released its writing exam (FCAT 2.0 Writing) results for 2013 (as well as the math and reading results for third graders only).  The Florida Department of Education (FLDOE) press release noted: “With significant gains in writing scores, Florida’s teachers and students continue to show that higher expectations and support at home and in the classroom enable every child to succeed.” This interpretation of the data was generally repeated without scrutiny in the press coverage of the results.

Putting aside the fact that the press release incorrectly calls the year-to-year changes “gains” (they are actually comparisons of two different groups of students; see here), the FLDOE's presentation of the FCAT Writing results, though common, is, at best, incomplete and, at worst, misleading. Moreover, the important issues in this case are applicable in all states, and unusually easy to illustrate using the simple data released to the public.

School Choice And Segregation In Charter And Regular Public Schools

A recent article in Reuters, one that received a great deal of attention, sheds light on practices that some charter schools are using essentially to screen students who apply for admission. These policies include requiring long and difficult applications, family interviews, parental contracts, and even demonstrations of past academic performance.

It remains unclear how common these practices might be in the grand scheme of things, but regardless of how frequently they occur, most of these tactics are terrible, perhaps even illegal, and should be stopped. At the same time, there are two side points to keep in mind when you hear about charges such as these, as well as the accusations (and denials) of charter exclusion and segregation that tend to follow.

The first is that some degree of (self-)sorting and segregation of students by abilities, interests and other characteristics is part of the deal in a choice-based system. The second point is that screening and segregation are most certainly not unique to charter/private schools, and one primary reason is that there is, in a sense, already a lot of choice among regular public schools.

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