The grades are in for Colorado’s public schools today, but parents expecting to learn whether their neighborhood schools earned passing grades might instead come away with more head-scratching questions than answers.
Of the 50-plus bits of school- accountability information offered from the Colorado Department of Education to parents and teachers from each of the state’s 1,594 schools, more than half are subject to human error or falsification.
Add that to past underreported school fights and dropout rates, and critics of the state’s annual School Accountability Reports say the information could give parents skewed assessments.
“The ratings are so superficial that they’re really not saying anything of substance about these schools,” said Alan Gott lieb, education program officer at Denver-based Piton Foundation.
Supporters of the report-card system have said the ratings give schools benchmarks from which to judge achievement, give newcomers to the state a way to choose the school that fits their child and hold districts responsible for how those students learn.
Colorado Education Commissioner William Moloney acknowledged that this year’s reports could have flaws but said the figures are the most comprehensive and accurate in their five-year existence.
This year’s reports will include better reporting of federal standards and a new category that assesses student progress, he said.
“There have been criticisms that we didn’t acknowledge the shortcomings of the past, but we think we have something that will give parents a fuller understanding of their schools,” Moloney said.
More than $330,000 was spent to print roughly 1 million report cards, which will be given to parents and teachers through December. The data will be released by Gov. Bill Owens today and reflect information from the 2004-05 school year.
Ratings in the reports vary from excellent to unsatisfactory and are used in part to identify struggling schools. Schools with three consecutive years of “unsatisfactory” ratings could be converted to charter-school status.
The reports – which essentially repackage already-released state test scores – also include school-specific information.
But schools or districts often are solely responsible for calculating many of those figures, with little state oversight.
Evidence of inaccuracies has come in a variety of figures over time. Student-teacher ratios often are figured differently from district to district, with some schools reporting entire staffs in the formula to make classes appear smaller. Dropout definitions differ from school to school, and principals at times have listed students as transfers to avoid reporting high dropout rates. And some school fights – including a sexual assault and a knifing – were never added to reports in an effort to make those schools seem safer.
“I think the test-score piece (of the reports) is valid, but the others I don’t think are valid,” said Jefferson County Public Schools Superintendent Cindy Stevenson, who heads the state’s largest district.
This year, the state has added data that track students over two years to show their progress.
Moloney said the state “does the best that it can” in a system that hands much of the power to individual districts. Colorado education officials have few penalties for schools caught falsifying data.
Unidentified districts in the past have given inaccurate data, but state officials have said those numbers were corrected and offending districts were more closely watched.
Kimberly Copanas, president of the Boulder Valley Council Parent-Teacher Association, said the accountability reports should be used only as one way for parents to understand their children’s school – not as a catchall for overall quality.
Staff writer Robert Sanchez can be reached at 303-820-1282 or rsanchez@denverpost.com.
What the School Accountability Reports mean
So you want to know more about your child’s school? A primer for parents:
Overall academic performance is the main reason you’re getting the School Accountability Report this month. It uses information from standardized tests to assess your school’s quality, using an “excellent” through “unsatisfactory” grading system.
A new category added to the assessment is “academic growth of students.” In general, it looks at standardized-test scores of students in your school and compares them with the same students’ scores from the previous year. From there you can see if student performance improved, stayed the same or declined.
Another addition to the report is an “adequate yearly progress” chart that shows how many targets your school had. AYP, part of the federal No Child Left Behind Act, is an accountability measure to ensure that schools are meeting the needs of all students. Larger schools generally have more AYP targets because they have more ethnic groups, languages and special-needs students to serve.
STAFF WRITER ROBERT SANCHEZ
