A tradition for five years under Gov. Bill Owens’ administration was a news conference in the first week of December to unveil the state’s School Accountability Reports.
Owens last year said the reports, which are mailed to parents and rank schools from “excellent” to “unsatisfactory,” were part of his legacy and hoped they would remain a tool to hold schools accountable.
Just as that governor is gone, so is the tradition of officially marking their release.
Some wonder whether the Colorado Department of Education’s quiet release Wednesday of the School Accountability Report is underplaying what Owens had championed.
“I only hope the lack of enthusiasm for the release is not an indication of Colorado’s parents being abandoned,” said Bob Schaffer, vice chairman of the state Board of Education.
State Education Department spokesman Mark Stevens said lack of a news conference does not belie any underlying significance.
“Nobody purposely said ‘Let’s do something different,’ ” Stevens said. “It’s a matter of scheduling.”
Gov. Bill Ritter has made improving schools a top priority, setting a goal of cutting the dropout rate in half, increasing the number of kids going to college and closing the achievement gap.
In April Ritter established the P-20 Council to examine how to improve the state’s education from preschool through college. That council last month offered a host of recommendations to improve schools.
And on Wednesday — the day of the School Accountability Report release — Ritter will speak at a “dropout summit” at a Westminster high school convened to investigate how to cut numbers of kids leaving school before graduating.
“You have a new governor and new commissioner,” said Evan Dreyer, Ritter’s spokesman. “What you are seeing is an effort to assess where we are and where we are going, and that vehicle is the P-20 Council. This is what we are focusing on.”
One of the P-20 Council’s recommendations is to streamline school accountability — and that could include changes to the School Accountability Reports.
School Accountability Reports give academic ratings to more than 1,700 schools based on how students perform on the Colorado Student Assessment Program given the year before. The CSAP measures how well students meet standards for math, science, reading and writing.
The reports also have details such as student-teacher ratios, number of fights and whether students showed academic growth over time. School Accountability Reports have long been a bitter pill for some in the education field, said Van Schoales, an education-policy expert from the Piton Foundation.
“Owens had to push this thing through against everyone in education,” Schoales said. “It was much better than what was there before, but there are problems with it.”
The report doesn’t take into account the challenges a school faces, specifically how many students are from poor families, Schoales said.
“The SAR is an average of an average of an average,” said Evie Hudak, state education board member. “It’s an average of the math, science, reading and writing tests. That doesn’t accurately reflect what is going on (in the school).”
Harmonizing the accountability information from federal and state reports, including the SAR, is a project currently underway, said Ken Turner, state education deputy commissioner.
About 1 million School Accountability Reports are being printed for parents, evidence the state is not shying away from accountability despite no news conference, Turner said.
Jeremy P. Meyer: 303-954-1367 or jpmeyer@denverpost.com
