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Today state education officials will release the annual School Accountability Reports, which give parents school-by-school information on everything from the number of fights in a school to whether students are improving on state assessment tests.
The annual school report cards give schools a ranking of “unsatisfactory,” “low,” “average,” “high” or “excellent” based on students’ scores on Colorado Student Assessment Program tests. These tests are given every spring for kids in third through 10th grades.
Also on this year’s report card is a “growth” rating, which gives parents, teachers and principals an idea of how well schools are doing in boosting scores – even if they are low-performing.
For a school to make “significant improvement,” there has to be a 15 percent net gain in students who showed measurable academic growth from one year to the next, said Dan Domagala of the Colorado Department of Education.
This means schools that show “significant improvement” can go down in ratings because the state uses two different formulas to calculate “improvement” ratings versus the actual grade a school gets, such as “low” or “high.”
For Alan Gottlieb, this part of the School Accountability Reports is the most helpful.
“To me, the improvement scores are much more helpful than anything else,” said Gottlieb, an education program officer at the Piton Foundation, which does education advocacy. “I think a lot of the stuff in the SARs aren’t that helpful, especially the overall ratings.” He said so much of a rating says more about “where the school is located” than how good the school is.
State Education Commissioner William Moloney disagreed. “They are supposed to be a lever of information concerning the quality of their schools and an incentive for positive change. It’s miles to go before we sleep, but I’m persuaded by these measures … I think schools have gotten better.”
