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Goodbye “School Performance Profile” (SPP), hello “Future Ready PA Index.” Pennsylvania Department of Education officials outlined the proposed new system for measuring school success during a teleconference Wednesday.
The new system should be in effect by the fall of 2018, replacing the short-lived SPP, introduced in 2013. SPP was itself a replacement of the “Adequate Yearly Progress” (AYP) gauge mandated by the 2001 federal “No Child Left Behind” law, which ushered in an era of heavy reliance on standardized test results when measuring school success.
What’s changing this time? And for that matter, what changed when SPP arrived?
PDE Office of Elementary and Secondary Education Deputy Secretary Matthew Stem offered an explanation with jargon appropriate to that lengthy title.
“There is a strong desire to have more holistic measures, to insure the school measuring system is aligned to college and career-ready outcomes.”
The best example might be the use of high school courses intended to be college-level: Advanced Placement and the locally less popular International Baccalaureate.
AYP ignored them completely. SPP included student performance in course tests as part of the calculation of a school’s overall score. Stem said the plan in constructing the Future Ready PA Index is to include how many courses are offered in a high school, and how many students are enrolled.
That, theoretically, should encourage school districts to expand both the offerings and the efforts to get students to take the tougher courses. Research shows students benefit from taking advanced courses even if they don’t do well in the final exams.
The use of career training tests and certifications — routinely given in Career and Technical Centers where the focus is on learning skills for a job rather than preparing for college — has a similar story: Ignored in AYP, test scores used in SPP, and the new index including some measure of number of options offered to students and number of students participating in those options.
Some yardsticks will remain. Both AYP and SPP used the percentage of students proficient or better in standardized tests as an important part of calculating a school’s success, though SPP substantially expanded the number of tests considered. The new index will look at those as well.
AYP gave a passing nod to the importance of student academic “growth,” rewarding schools that didn’t meet proficiency requirements but did show substantial improvement in test results. SPP made growth an important part of its calculations, looking at how well a school “closed the gap” between students not achieving proficiency and those who did.
The new index likewise will use growth, though so far it is focusing more on overall improvement rather than gap closing.
Stem said that the initial plan was to have a single number for each school, akin to SPP, which crunches all the data into a ranking from zero to 100, with a few “extra points” available. But as the process evolved, PDE began “pumping the brakes on that.”
The reason: No Child Left Behind is gone, replaced in December with a new version dubbed the “Every Student Succeeds Act.” That law substantially backs away from the notion of grading schools based primarily on standardized tests, giving states greater leeway in measuring academic achievement.
Stem said that some states are adopting a “dashboard” approach, offering several broader measures of a school’s performance rather than a single score. PDE has begun considering that approach as well.
Nothing is final, Stem noted. The process began nearly two years ago and is roughly two-thirds done. Wednesday’s teleconference followed a series of webinars the same day designed to give educators an explanation of which “indicators” the state is planning to use in the final system.
The next step is to hammer out the “methodology” applied to those indicators — to determine how important each indicator is (give it “weight”) in assessing a school, and to figure out how the assessment will be presented to the public (i.e., a single score or a dashboard).