{"id":97906,"date":"2018-09-19T23:56:39","date_gmt":"2018-09-20T05:56:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/colorado-reconsiders-its-formula-for-rating-schools\/"},"modified":"2018-09-19T23:56:39","modified_gmt":"2018-09-20T05:56:39","slug":"colorado-reconsiders-its-formula-for-rating-schools","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/colorado-reconsiders-its-formula-for-rating-schools\/","title":{"rendered":"Colorado reconsiders its formula for rating schools"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

\"Most
Most Colorado schools and districts get a passing score from state regulators who track their performance. Yet, fewer than half of Colorado\u2019s third-graders meet state expectations in literacy.<\/span>Craig F. Walker\/Associated Press file<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/p>

The vast majority of Colorado schools and districts get a passing score from state regulators who track their performance. Yet,<\/p>\n

This disconnect has members of the Colorado State Board of Education calling for a change in how much weight the state gives to certain factors in determining whether a school or district is doing its job or needs more oversight.<\/p>\n

\u201cBoth of those things cannot be true,\u201d board member Steve Durham, a Colorado Springs Republican, said Wednesday. \u201cYou cannot characterize the student as not performing and the school as performing.\u201d<\/p>\n

Colorado\u2019s school accountability system<\/a> rates districts based on achievement on state literacy, math and science tests; on annual academic growth; and, for high schools, on postsecondary readiness as measured by graduation rates, dropout rates, scores on college entrance exams and enrollment in college.<\/p>\n

Schools rated in the lowest two tiers \u2013 turnaround or priority improvement \u2013 go on the state\u2019s performance watch or \u201con the clock.\u201d Such schools face state intervention, which can include closing or turning over management to a charter organization, if they don\u2019t move into a higher tier after five years. So far, the state has shied away from drastic action and approved improvement plans brought forward by districts themselves, but that could change as some have not shown enough progress.<\/p>\n

At the elementary and middle school level, 60 percent of a school\u2019s rating is based on growth, a measure of how much progress students make compared to other, similarly situated students, while 40 percent is based on achievement, a measure of what students know. At the high school level, 40 percent of a school\u2019s rating is based on growth, 30 percent on achievement and 30 percent on measures of postsecondary readiness.<\/p>\n

Achievement on standardized tests is strongly correlated with students\u2019 socioeconomic background, and many experts believe growth scores are a better reflection of whether schools are helping students learn.<\/p>\n

But there remains the troubling question of whether students are learning what they need to know in school, whether that\u2019s third-graders having the literacy skills to carry them through the rest of their education or high school graduates being able to attend college without taking remedial courses.<\/p>\n

\u201cIs it time for us to put greater weight on achievement, since that is where we want to go?\u201d asked Angelika Schroeder, the Boulder Democrat who chairs the state board. \u201cWe want to see growth, but achievement is what matters.\u201d<\/p>\n

The ratings formula ties into a long-running debate among testing experts. Groups like The Education Trust, which supports test-based accountability, argue that growth models water down expectations for disadvantaged students and don\u2019t measure whether students will eventually reach proficiency. Others argue that achievement data is too closely tied to poverty to be a meaningful measure of school performance.<\/p>\n

Durango School District Superintendent Dan Snowberger said he opposes putting greater weight on achievement rather than growth in measuring schools and school districts.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s going to create disincentives for any school looking to improve,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

In Denver Public Schools, parents and civil rights groups have questioned how schools could be rated green based on growth rates when most students in those schools couldn\u2019t read on grade level. The district continues to tweak its own school performance framework in response to criticism.<\/p>\n

Some states also use a hybrid measure known as growth-to-standard that looks at how long it would take students to reach grade level if they continued to make progress at the same rate.<\/p>\n

This measure comes in for some of the same criticism as achievement data.<\/p>\n

\u201cAs an accountability metric, growth-to-proficiency is a terrible idea for the same reason that achievement-level metrics are a bad idea \u2013 it is just about poverty,\u201d Cory Koedel, an economist at the University of Missouri who has studied school accountability, told Chalkbeat last year.<\/p>\n

Colorado\u2019s school ratings used to include a growth-to-standard measure as a major component, but they haven\u2019t taken it into account since 2015, when changes in assessments made year-over-year comparisons difficult.<\/p>\n

Now that the assessments have stabilized and comparisons are more appropriate, the state will be adding growth-to-standard back in, as required by law. That provides an opportunity to revisit how much weight each factor in the school performance framework gets. A technical advisory panel will be studying the issue this fall and make recommendations to the state board.<\/p>\n

One of the questions state board members want answered before they render a decision in early 2019 is how applying a standard that more heavily weights achievement would have affected school ratings and the possibility of state intervention.<\/p>\n

Preliminary ratings based on 2018 test data placed 90 percent of Colorado school districts and 83 percent of schools in the higher tiers that essentially leave the schools free to do their work as they see fit.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Durango superintendent opposes putting more emphasis on achievement over growth<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":97907,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5736,5735],"tags":[13],"naviga_topic":[],"class_list":["post-97906","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-local-news","category-news","tag-frontpage-lead"],"acf":[],"author_name":"dh_admin","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/97906","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=97906"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/97906\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/97907"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=97906"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=97906"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=97906"},{"taxonomy":"naviga_topic","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/naviga_topic?post=97906"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}