Dayton Daily News education reporter Scott Elliott writes about schools, kids, teaching and learning.
Home > Blogs > Get on the Bus > Archives > 2006 > August > 23
Wednesday, August 23, 2006
Time for some perspective?
OK, OK. So perhaps I’ve gone a little report card crazy here at Get on the Bus. At least one of my readers thinks it’s because I love standardized testing and am obsessed with the sports metaphor “horse race” coverage of who’s winning and losing.
Let me try to clarify a few things.
First, let’s go over what exactly where we’ve been since last week’s state report card release:
—We’ve ranked the Miami Valley’s high schools, elementary schools and school districts, plus listed where the local districts all fell in on the state’s academic rating scale.
—We covered some general highlights of trends for local districts.
—We also looked at charter schools and how they compared to the rest of the city’s public schools.
—And we offered up one method for considering the report card winners and losers.
Seems like a lot, doesn’t it?
It’s not. It’s just a scratch on the surface of the gigantic pile of data that comes with the report card release. There’s still tons more data — test scores broken down by student status of various types — ethnicity, gender, disability, etc. There’s also lots of data about teachers and district spending.
In the past, the paper hasn’t done all that much with this data — just a simple ranking and who’s up, who’s down, etc. To be honest, I always felt a little guilty that we didn’t give our readers more. I knew there was interest in this information, but there just wasn’t space in the paper to dive into such detail.
And there still isn’t. In the actual paper, there’s been just three report card stories — one on the overall state results, one on the results for the Miami Valley and one on charter school performance, the latest installment of a comparison I’ve been doing for six years.
But this year, with the blog, I realized there was really no limit to what we could write about online. So I began putting up some of the figures I thought people would be most interested in. School-level data, for instance, is rarely reported. And judging by reader response, people did, indeed, want this information — the post on elementary schools set a one-day Get on the Bus record for page views.
But there is a danger here, one an eagle-eyed reader was quick to point out. Does all this data mean test scores are all that matter?
Those who have followed our education reporting here at the DDN through the years might find it amusing that I should have to answer this question. In the past, I’ve written here about the weaknesses of standardized tests, such as what a test can’t tell you, and just last year, Mark Fisher and I won a national award for our series Flunking the Test, a critique of standardized testing that earned us a few nasty letters from testing advocates.
But I think what I missed this year was a post like I had last year, trying to put the scores in perspective by explaining what it all means.
Test scores have incredible importance today for schools and students. Our elected leaders, both at the state and national level, have chosen standardized tests as the primary tool for evaluating educational quality.
Even so, test scores are just one way to judge school performance. They are most useful for comparing one school or district to another. But they do not tell the whole story of whether a schools is good or bad, effective or not.
Think of it in medical terms. As a heart patient, I’m fairly obsessed with my cholesterol these days. But I have to keep in mind that this is but one measure of my heart health. I also have to pay attention to blood pressure, my weight, my fitness level, my stress and my doctor’s expert opinion. Plenty of people with good cholesterol still have heart attacks.
Equate your school’s standardized test results to a cholesterol check. If your school’s score is the best around, it doesn’t necessarily mean it is the most healthy. It’s useful information, but not all you need to know. Look at other measures, too — attendance, teacher and principal quality, the experience of your children and their friends, your own observations.
And try to keep things in perspective.
(Image credit: Whitman Middle School, Alexandria, Va.)
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