Last Wednesday, I went to the one and only session offered by the Georgia DOE in the metro Atlanta area to give feedback on the state’s ideas for revising state policy to comply with the federal education law known as the “Every Student Succeeds Act” (ESSA). I think every person—parent, educator, community member—who has an interest in the public education of students should take advantage of opportunities to influence policies that affect K-12 schools, so I endured typically terrible Atlanta traffic on I-75 and I-285 to get to north Fulton County as close as I could to the start of the 6 p.m. session (note to GaDOE: I applaud you for scheduling these chances for feedback, but did you have to schedule the one feedback session for the most densely populated area of the state at the peak of rush hour?). Here are some of my thoughts related to the session.
You can read much more on the GaDOE website, but in summary, the GaDOE has established five working committees to craft proposed policies to comply with ESSA:
- Accountability
- Assessment
- Teacher and Leader Development
- Education of the Whole Child
- Federal Programs to Support School Improvement
There are certain “non-negotiables” of ESSA and related regulations within which Georgia and all states must work within, such as:
- Assessment of all students in ELA and math annually in grades 3-8 and once in high school
- Assessment of students in science at least once in elementary, middle, and high school
- Annual reporting of school and district data related to assessment proficiency rates, graduation, another academic measure, and a measure of “school quality or student success”
The sessions like the one I attended are designed to gather feedback from Georgians about the state’s ideas to use the flexibility granted under ESSA (within those constraints mentioned above) in various areas. Two things stood out to me at the Fulton County session:
- Lots of people don’t like CCRPI and/or Milestones and how they are used
- Lots of people don’t really know what CCRPI and/or Milestones are all about
There was quite a bit of passion about the state’s accountability tools (CCRPI and Milestones), some of which I got and some of which seemed like misplaced conspiracy theories to me. And there were also a lot of statements that reflected a pretty surface level understanding of these tools and how they are used. I don’t expect everyone to have an in-depth knowledge of state school report cards and standardized tests, but I think the misinformation I heard from some participants at the session underscores both the work the GaDOE has ahead of itself in educating the public and the limits of thinking that publishing a “report card” on each school and district as a part of making them “accountable” is sound policy.
Each person had to pick two committee breakout sessions to attend, and I went with the Accountability and the Assessment committees. Below are the questions we were asked in the accountability breakout session and my responses to them:
How should a school’s successes or failures be measured? Does the current rating system accurately reflect the performance of your school?
I’ll start with the second question first. Do I think CCRPI “accurately reflects the performance” of ANCS? No, I do not. First, I don’t think it is even accurate in what it is measuring since the reliance on data from nearly 30 different indicators virtually guarantees there will be some data collection or calculation errors that mess up scores, as has been the case for our school almost every year CCRPI has been calculated.
Aside from the accuracy of the data and calculations, I’ve long had bigger qualms with CCRPI and the way that is used to measure “performance”—the dangers of using a single score to assess schools, some of the measures used, and the way that accountability decisions are made based upon it (all of which I described in much more detail in a blog post back in January 2014). So to the GaDOE’s first question of how we should “measure a school’s successes or failures” I would say that the GaDOE should only report the bare minimum of what ESSA requires. Give an annual reporting of proficiency and growth on ELA and math tests, student attendance, and the one or two other required measures and leave it at that. Beyond these basic foundational requirements, there are too many variations on what different schools deem important to capture well in a single, monolithic “report card”. The state has tried using common surveys of parents, students, and teachers, but they don’t always reflect the sorts of questions that are important to across different communities. There are points awarded in the current system for indicators (like whether a school is STEM-certified) that cannot be earned by all schools because they aren’t financially feasible or of interest to all schools. And at the feedback session I attended, one parent suggested measuring schools’ impact on social-emotional learning, another idea I would strongly caution against. My advice on a revamped school accountability system: keep it simple so that it is easy to understand and so that it doesn’t try to be all things to all people. Parents can use this information along with actually visiting schools to better know what they think about a school.
After reading through the information about Georgia’s ESSA plans on the GaDOE website, if you have your own feedback, please email it to essa@doe.k12.ga.us (or you can drive to Albany for the next in-person feedback session, which might be quicker than driving through rush hour traffic in Atlanta!).