AJC.com > Blogs > Get Schooled > Archives > 2006 > June > 21 > Entry
DEL.ICIO.USDid She Really Say “Best”???
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
People who have known me for a long time on the schools beat are surprised to see my name next to a “Best Schools” story.
When parents ask me which school I think is best, I usually trip over myself explaining why it’s an impossible question to answer without knowing what their idea of a “best school” is. Yes, I have my own ideas of what fits my bill. But that’s just my opinion, and it’s my policy not to share it for fear someone will take it as advice, enroll their child somewhere, have a bad experience and then come after me. (A little paranoid? Maybe…)
But this story was an effort to give readers what they have been asking for: a list of schools that scored the highest.
We used scale scores, not the percent of students passing or exceeding the standard. The scale score is a more precise number less subject to niggly questions such as, “What about a school that has the highest percent of kid exceeding the standard but also has a higher percent of kids not passing? Should they really be ahead of a school with a lower percent of kids exceeding the standard but everybody passing?”
My colleague Bridget asked this exact question, and from there we decided to use scale scores. There are a lot of schools bunched at the top, which means many excellent schools did not make our various lists. (We ran several lists to provide a range of schools…)
I tried to provide context in the story, including a parent who has been in the game for a long time and long ago stopped worrying about which school has the highest score. But still, this package involves lists. And, yes, the word “best” is in there, several times.
I don’t like the word. But having had a night to think about it and a morning of fielding phone calls from readers, I think we were right to use it. Maybe.
Comments
By holdingAJC"accountable"
June 21, 2006 02:04 PM | Link to this
Look at all these “best schools.” Then, look at all the “worst schols.” Compare the discipline problems at each (and the amount of support teachers get from administrators in enforcing consequences) and then ask yourself why are we willing to “reform” everything BUT discipline?
By Nel
June 21, 2006 02:25 PM | Link to this
I cannot believe no middle in Dekalb made the top 10. Than again, the best ones did get inundated from transfers and Katrina. This should not reflect on those schools the country that traditionally excel,but should be a wake up call to the county Administration because perception seems to be everything.
By lynn d
June 21, 2006 04:07 PM | Link to this
Ok, since Patti said it in her intro to the discussion about the principals and referred to it a bit in the article, I went and looked at the middle schools (top ten in math).
If you exclude Richmond Middle which has both requirements for admission and then requirements to remain, related to academics, not one middle school on the list had a free and reduced lunch rate (how poverty is measured in schools) of more than 12 percent. In fact, only Autry Mill and Crews, were even in double digits. Exluding Richmond, the average poverty rate at these schools was 6 percent; if you include richmond the average goes up to 7.4 percent, still not significant.
I think highest scoring is a better way to describe these schools than best. For example, one of the middle schools had a not meeting expectation of 3 percent and a poverty rate of 3 percent. It would be nice to know who if there is a total correlation there.
By Yep
June 21, 2006 06:04 PM | Link to this
Lynn D,
The issue that you describe is at the heart of one of the good things that has come from NCLB: subgroups scores get teased out and count for something. So one can really see which schools are really getting something done and which seems to cruise on their demographics alone.
My hope is that, if the county sticks with NCLB post Bush, we’ll really get to see what practice really work with different types of kids, and we can improve instruction for everybody.
By janine
June 21, 2006 06:36 PM | Link to this
Right on, Lynn D…..I will wager all the middle school scores will correlate positively with the “free lunch” percentage..But I think that’s pretty well established . Also, many the schools that don’t make AYP don’t make it because of subgroups low scores…..Limited English speakers, special ed., etc. And many who DO make AYP do not have the required number of students in subgroups to be counted as a subgroup for AYP purposes
By MMM
June 22, 2006 11:02 AM | Link to this
Janine—you are right on about some schools passing just because there weren’t enough students in the challenge subgroups to count.
The was true of at least one of the Dekalb middle schools everyone from Freedom wanted into. The irony was that this school did no better than Freedom for limited English students (the group Freedom flunked for) but they squeaked just under needing to count the catagory BECAUSE at the last minute the DOE upped the size of the subgroup needed to count based on a percentage of the size of the school rather than a flat 40%.
I bet they flunk this year because of the additional LEP kids make the catagory count—all the resident parents were upset at the number of transfers in and will claim it is because of them.
By David Kirk
June 22, 2006 12:37 PM | Link to this
Scores, scores…As an educator I am tired of us not putting all this in perspective. for one thing passing a standardized test can mean many things: the student may be a good test taker, they might have been taught what is on the test or they might just get lucky. these test really don’t tell us what students are learning. The other thing is the margin of difference in scores…Who decides that my school is failing if I am a point less than your school and you are a “good school” because you made a point higher than I did. NCLB has a few good points and many flaws and peoples’ jobs are on the line. It sounds good if you are a politician and want to “reform things” (translate: get votes). The truth is simple solutions for complex problems are not solutions at all. Let’s get at the real issues, do something about poverty: In a Massachusetts study it was found that “86 percent of schools with more than 40 percent of their students in poverty are projected to fail to make AYP. Such schools tend to be either in urban or rural districts.” (from: MassPartners for Public Schools 231 Butler Road Monson, MA 01057 413-267-3200)
Fix poverty
David K
By Cynthia
June 22, 2006 12:44 PM | Link to this
Yes, “best schools usually have involved parents.” Tiber Ridge Elementary in Cob County, Livsey Elementary in DeKalb COunty, and Crabappale Crossing Elementary in north Fulton also have another factor in common: 2-12% of students receiving free or reduced lunch as compared to the state average of 46%. Some of the other high performing schools mentioned in the article also have low precentages of students receiving free or reduced lunch in the 1-12% range. Might these statistics tell us why parents are more involved?
By MMM
June 22, 2006 01:10 PM | Link to this
I agree with David’s comments about score being an extremely incomplete measure effected by many variables. BUT there is NO other empirical comparison available to an outsider. Every private school has promoters saying it is best and many of them are less competent than the personnel in the public school, they just coast on the involvement, cooperation and educational level of the parents.
In college one of the first things I learned in engineering class is that with a completely controled process the only variation you will get in output is due to variations in the input. As a society, we tent to want to measure what we value, and tend to discount what we haven’t bothered to measure. We do not have a completely controlled process in education, so without some form a measurement how would we even know that we should be looking at the 16% of high poverty schools in Massachusetts that actually MAKE AYP. What are they doing differently? Is it transferable to the others? If the changes didn’t work, what other variable did we not consider that we think may be important?
This kind of measure, investigate, try and remeasure process is the norm elsewhere. Why would we not use it on something as valuable to our society as the education of our children? We may need to argue about what are meanful measurments and who has responsibility for the needed changes—but to say that public education should take a pass on this basic method of improvement is to give up.
If you have given up, why are you posting to this BLOG?
By decaturparent
June 23, 2006 11:16 AM | Link to this
You know, I can’t stand NCLB, but the reporting formats required by it do help parents really see which schools are getting the teaching done and which are cruising on demographics. For instance, take our high school, whose overall SATs and EOCTs are lower than “high performing schools” in the burbs.
However, if you dissaggregate the data, you see that all of our schools actually perform better when you compare our upper middle class kids to theirs. Also, when you compare our lower income kids to theirs, they also do better. The difference is that we have to educate a diverse population (everyone from public housing residents to residents in million dollar houses), while they have a very narrow (and affluent) demographic so our aggregate scores include kids who don’t have every advantage.
To me a good school is a school that can educate a wide variety of children well and that can offer a broad education. I have friends with kids in the “high score” schools. My kids score as well as theirs on standardized tests, plus my kids get foreign language every day, art weekly and music & PE twice a week. They also get recess every day and don’t have any students in trailers. They have 200-300 kids in elementary school rather then 2000 and can walk with their buddies to school. They do not get crct drill sheets sent home every night either. My kids love school, but have friends in the big suburban schools that can’t stand school.
Parents need to do their homework and really look at what they want for their kids and not just blindly send them to the overall highest scoring school. If diversity doesn’t scare you, look for a school that can educate a wide demographic very well, and offers an innovative and rich hands on pedagogy. Look at the disaggregated data and see if the school is teaching kids like yours well compared to other schools.
Well, that’s my two cents!