Do our schools make the grade?
Group’s assessment gives 6 local schools a B; the rest get C or lower
Enlargephoto JERRY McBRIDE/Durango Herald
What’s more reflective of schools’ performance? Durango School District 9-R official Christy Bloomquist, bathed in the projection of testing data, says the state’s system is best. A new, community-based group aims to clarify the evaluation process for noneducators.
A coalition of community groups has taken the A through F grading system so familiar to students and applied it to Colorado’s schools.
Enlargephoto JERRY McBRIDE/Durango Herald
Cindy Keresey, left, who works in literary intervention at Park Elementary School, Kathleen Lau, center, interim principal, and Lindsay Neiman, instructional coach, look at testing data on Friday.
The grade most Durango schools received was merely passing. None received an A.
The website, Colorado School Grades, uses students’ standardized test scores to create a report card for each school that’s meant to decipher the somewhat cryptic school performance data published by the state.
The nearly $1 million project was launched last month by a coalition of community organizations.
In proposing an alternative, the grading website has shone a spotlight on the Colorado Department of Education’s current ranking system and questioned its effectiveness at informing parents, students and community members about school performance.
But administrators defended the state’s system and cited the potential of the new grading scheme to cause confusion about school performance.
“Why do you need another report card when all the data is right here?” said Christy Bloomquist, supervisor of federal programs and assessments with Durango School District 9-R.
The state’s system ranks schools from highest- to lowest-performing using the descriptors performance, improvement, priority improvement and turnaround. Its rating is based on schools’ absolute scores, while Colorado School Grades rates them based on how well they perform relative to others in the state.
Matching method to purpose
Some said the meaningfulness of the rating depends on the audience. The Colorado School Grades website is meant for parents, students and community members, so it simplifies the information into an easily understandable report, said Colorado Succeeds president Tim Taylor, a member of the Colorado School Grades coalition.
The Colorado Department of Education’s performance frameworks are aimed at educators, Bloomquist said. That data allow them to dissect where schools are excelling and where they need to improve.
The letter grades don’t drill down far enough for educators seeking to make improvements, she said.
The new grading website used the same standardized test results as the education department. The difference is that the grades website applied a curve that highlights the top performers. Only the top 10 percent of schools received an A, while schools in the 15th to 65th percentile range received a C. Meanwhile, CDE’s grading system gives the top ranking, performance, to the top 60 percent of schools.
The aim of Colorado School Grades is to help parents better distinguish between different schools’ performance.
“Nowhere else in our lives would we say 42nd percentile and 98th percentile would be called the same thing,” Taylor said.
Six of the 16 district schools in La Plata County that were ranked by Colorado School Grades received B grades and eight received C grades. One school received a D and another an F.
Bloomquist said the A through F grades can be misleading because they don’t match up to a school’s CDE percentage score and may not accurately reflect its actual performance. Sunnyside’s B-minus rating, for example, doesn’t reflect that the school received two awards last year from the Colorado Department of Education that put it in the top 8 percent of schools in the state and named it one of state’s top 10 highly effective Title I schools.
It also would be impossible to compare schools between the two ratings because they use different scales, said Rocco Fuschetto, superintendent of Ignacio School District.
“It’s like comparing apples and oranges,” Fuschetto said.
Despite some drawbacks, the grading system contributes to the overall effort to disseminate information about the schools, which is a good thing, said Bill Esterbrook, interim superintendent of Durango’s schools.
“I like anything that keeps how our schools are doing in front of the public eye,” he said. “The more transparent the better.”
Suzanne Carlson, a parent of three elementary school students, said that, from a parent’s perspective, the education department’s rankings aren’t published and publicized in a way that is understandable and accessible.
“I don’t know why the district doesn’t take information and make an easy-to-understand way for parents to see it,” Carlson said.
Esterbrook agreed that the state could be better.
“In some cases there’s way too much data,” he said.
Compared to years ago, when the information was a guarded secret, the state has done a good job making it transparent. But “it’s not the best process yet,” he said.
The monitoring challenge
The new grading system brings up the longstanding challenge for districts to analyze their progress. Most agree the once-a-year state standardized tests aren’t an effective measure by themselves.
The monitoring report Durango School District presents to its school board, for example, includes students’ grades, their standardized test scores and their performance on triannual tests that cover reading, writing, math and science.
It’s a more wholistic analysis than the state’s performance frameworks, Bloomquist said. The district continues to seek a more comprehensive means of accessing performance and has been working to add data about discipline and progress toward graduation.
Fuschetto said he has been preaching for years about the downfalls of evaluating schools only through standardized testing, which doesn’t measure the impact of programs like art, agriculture or welding that add to the learning experience.
And standardized testing has always been a struggle for charter schools, said Michael Ackerman, head of school at Animas High School. The high school received a B-minus by Colorado School Grades and was ranked a performance school with a score of 74 percent by the state Department of Education.
Animas takes a project-based approach to learning that doesn’t prioritize preparing students to meet standardized testing standards.
“It’s like we play basketball all year, and we show up one day for a baseball game,” Ackerman said.
The best way to judge a school?
Come inside and walk around, educators said.
