A proposed school evaluation system could have major effects on the images of area schools, and hits Toledo Public Schools especially hard.
Part of Ohio's request for a waiver from No Child Left Behind Act requirements includes a proposal by the state's Department of Education for a new school rating system. Gone would be designations such as "academic emergency" and "excellent."
In the designation's place would be an A through F scale.
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Gone also would be high rankings for many districts, with A's sparsely distributed, as the new system is considerably more rigorous.
But TPS would be one of the biggest losers in the state under the proposal. Now ranked in "continuous improvement" — the equivalent of a C — TPS would have received an F under the new system, joined only by one other traditional school district.
Toledo officials on Friday said they welcomed accountability, but a sudden drop in a district's score, despite no change in actual performance, would be tough to explain to the community and would overshadow gains made in the districtwide transformation plan.
"School districts like ourselves and others may be making significant progress and still labeled with a lower score," TPS Chief Academic Officer Jim Gault said, "and that will be very tough to talk through."
The system is preliminary and is contingent on the waiver process and action by the state legislature. Ohio Department of Education officials say this system is easier to understand and levels the playing field.
"In most cases, this is a far more rigorous system than the one currently used," Stan Heffner, state superintendent of public instruction, said in an email.
The current system depends heavily on the performance index score, a weighted average of student test scores on a 0-120-point scale. Toledo's continuous improvement designation is based on its 83.1 performance index score, placing it in the middle of the pack for urban Ohio districts. A school can get a boost from scoring well on the "value-added" portion, which measures how much a student grows academically in a year.
The proposed system combines scores in four categories into an overall grade. The performance index score now would count for only a quarter of the grade, as would the value-added metric, how many state-designated benchmarks a district reaches, and a metric called gap closing, which measures how well a school closes achievement gaps in demographic subgroups.
Schools and districts earn a letter in each metric, with an A worth a point, a B worth 0.75 point, and so on. Scores in each metric then are added for the total score — a cumulative score of 3.75 and above earns an overall A.
The Education Department ran a simulation of how schools and districts would have performed on last year's report cards under the new system. Toledo scored poorly across the board. The district got Fs in the benchmark indicators and value-added metrics and Ds in the performance index and gap metrics.
Mr. Gault said he was concerned that the state was raising standards while it cut school funding. District officials will have a tough sell to voters in the fall to pass a TPS levy with an F grade, even if the district's transformation plan shows significant gains this year, because the district won't be able to compare to past years' performances.
"It would be nice to have a level comparison," Mr. Gault said.
He said TPS will have to continue to improve to avoid the F stigma if the new system is implemented.
Mr. Gault said district administration has hopes that elements of the transformation plan could generate gains in the value-added and gap measurements, boosting the district's score this year.
Continued improvement in teacher training and data use will be vital, as will investments in high-poverty schools.
"We do have an opportunity to make some serious gains," he said.
It's not just low-performing schools that take issue with the new system. Of the 352 traditional districts that last year earned an "excellent" or "excellent with distinction" designation — the equivalent of an A and A+ — only 17 would have earned an A under the proposed grading scale.
Ottawa Hills is one of those top performers which would be hurt under the new ranking system. Considered "excellent" last year, the district had the ninth-best performance index. And yet the district would have earned only a B under the new system, placing it on even ground with most of Toledo's suburban districts.
The drop is entirely because of a C grade in the value-added metric. Superintendent Kevin Miller said districts such as Ottawa Hills, where most students are already top performers on state tests, simply can't grow enough to earn an A and are unfairly punished.
The proposed system is not a boon to the charter school movement, either. Although 76 percent of traditional public schools scored a C or above, only 22 percent of charter schools did so.
Not everyone loses in the new system. Washington Local Schools was ranked effective last year, the equivalent of a B and a step below Ottawa Hills. Under the new scale, both share the B grade. Although Ottawa Hills has angst about some of the metrics, Washington Local saw much to like.
"One thing we did like about it was the breadth and the depth around value-added and closing the achievement gaps," said Brian Davis, Washington Local's curriculum and instruction director.
Contact Nolan Rosenkrans at: nrosenkrans@theblade.com or 419-724-6086.
First Published March 10, 2012, 5:14 a.m.
