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BHI Education Study
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from NewsLink, Vol. 5, No. 2, Winter 2001
Not without some anxiety, parents, teachers and administrators will leaf through the state's new public school performance rating system trying to make sense of the data. They will glean test scores from 4th, 8th and 10th grades to see if their neighborhood schools are among the 56% that failed to meet the higher standards set for them as part of the Education Reform Act of 1993. Unfortunately, they will be getting only part of the story. The rating system released by the Department of Education in January offers a window to the new world of accountability placed upon every school district in the Commonwealth. Only 44% of the schools reviewed by DOE managed to exceed, meet or approach the higher expectations established since 1998.
Taxpayers, who have poured more than $6 billion in education reform money into the state's schools, are expecting improvement in performance. The 2003 requirement that students pass the MCAS test in order to graduate is proving controversial. Critics maintain that the MCAS is a flawed, one-size-fits-all test conducted at the expense of “real” learning. They believe there should be multiple measures of achievement.
One thing is clear. The new MCAS rating system gives no consideration to the widely divergent but highly important socioeconomic factors with which schools and communities must contend. Thus, by looking only at raw scores, the DOE rating system may be overlooking the real performance not only of teachers and administrators, but of parents as well. And by focusing on raw scores alone, the rating system ignores spending levels, computer usage, class size and demographics, which are key ingredients to any measure.
There are other underlying factors to be considered as well. These include student-teacher ratios, a community's crime rate, the number of professionals living in a district and the number of single-parent households.
Two years ago, the Beacon Hill Institute began a study of school performance based on MCAS results. BHI's Massachusetts Education Assessment Model, built as part of the project, measures how well or how poorly a school performs relative to what can be predicted based on a statistical analysis. The BHI model takes into account a broad range of socioeconomic factors that are unaccounted for in the DOE ratings. By including these factors, the model does a better job of assessing and determining what make one school succeed while another fails. Insights like these can be invaluable to educators seeking to improve their school's performance.
Consider the Everett school district. An urban district, Everett might be expected to underperform when compared to a suburban town such as Sudbury. Part of that explanation may be that Sudbury historically spends more of its own source revenues on its public schools. But Everett actually fares better under the BHI rating system.
A rating system based on 1998 MCAS raw scores would rank Everett 4th graders 130th out of 216, substantially below Sudbury, which ranked 13th. In fact, when socioeconomic and other factors are taken into account, Everett did a much better job of teaching its students than Sudbury.
Another example is the Hadley school district. According to the DOE ratings, Hadley 10th graders failed to meet performance standards. But the BHI model tells a different story for this Western Massachusetts town. Hadley 10th graders ranked 3rd out of 220 school districts.
Devising a rating system is not easy. But to be effective, the system must identify schools that achieve high performance with the resources and socioeconomic factors of the communities they serve. To do otherwise misleads educators and parents. It also shortchanges our children. That is the best reason of all for getting the rating system right in the first place.
NewsLink is the quarterly newsletter of the Beacon Hill Institute for Public Policy Research at Suffolk University. © 1996-2003. All rights reserved.
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