Universities should offer advance degrees in interpreting standardized test results; oh wait, they do. Perhaps that is how “measures of accountability” can get so far beyond the typical person's understanding.
Over the past few days our education reporter Lee Gray, and others on staff as she could corner them, have sifted through the embargoed report card results for the School District of Newberry County and its member schools. Just as every year it gets harder to earn a high rating, every year it grows harder to interpret how schools and districts earned the ratings they did.
The report cards were the brain child of South Carolina's Education Accountability Act of 1998. The ultimate state goal: be ranked in the top half of states educationally by the year 2010. That is an intimidating goal, considering where South Carolina has traditionally rested in almost any state-by-state assessment of educational achievement-bottom of the heap. The bars have been set progressively higher each year to measure against meeting this 2010 goal, that's just about two years off now if you are counting, and new parts of the testing process have been added in with each passing year as well. The achievement reporting has become more and more convoluted as the report card has progressively strayed away from existence as a reporting tool and turned more into a laundry list of measurements that include a growing roster of data that educators say influence the results-achievement.
Educators say using just one or two measures, like PACT and an exit exam, and slapping a letter grade on a school is simplistic and judgmental. Maybe so. In fact, as the report cards get more and more difficult to “ace” by anyone, you hear more and more educators talking about how “judgmental” the system is and how it does not contribute to achievement. Maybe so.
However, the state report cards were not conceived as an educational tool but rather as a reporting tool. We, as a state, have tried to make them both. Gathering cohort data and socioeconomic statistics, creating subgroups among test scores and measuring the attendance to school of students, parents and teachers-all of this effort has been toward the goal of better identifying where we lack and where we tower in education. Raking in this information is supposed to be helpful to the educators and administrators as they strategize on how to improve a student or a school. But the report cards were created to give simple information to simple folk about how the schools are faring. They were conceived of as motivational (some would say judgmental) by the virtue of a common standard of perception, by slapping letter grades on. Impressive grades earned kudos and bonuses. Grades that slipped were supposed to be greeted with expert educational help from the state. Not surprisingly those motivating tools were not funded. That and many other reasons have contributed to a disillusionment with report cards, the tests they are mainly based on and the worth to anyone of the effort.
In trying to meet two purposes, in trying to make the reporting of this achievement data simultaneously simple and complex, we need to ask if the students' needs are being met. We also need to ask if we, as a community or as a state, are getting what we asked for. Maybe so, or maybe not.
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