The Ohio School Report Cards replaced letter grades with a five-star rating system this year, and for some area districts those stars did not align any better under the new model.
The annual school report cards for the 2021-22 academic year that were released Thursday measure five categories: achievement, progress, gap closing, graduation, and early literacy.
“Achievement” looks at whether student performance on state tests met previously established thresholds and how well students performed on tests overall during the previous academic year. “Progress” measures students’ growth based on their past performances, and “gap closing” measures district performance at reducing educational gaps for student subgroups.
For the final two categories, “graduation” is scored based on 4 and 5-year graduation rates while “early literacy” measures kindergarten through third-grade reading improvement and overall proficiency scores.
Toledo Public and Washington Local school districts received the fewest stars compared to other area public school districts this year — earning one-to-two stars in achievement, graduation rates, and early literacy.
Washington Local performed slightly better in graduation, earning two stars after dipping in its 4-year rate from 88.6 percent to 87.3 percent, which is slightly higher than the overall state graduation rate of 87 percent. By comparison, TPS earned one star after its 4-year graduation rate dropped from 82.3 percent to 74.7 percent.
But TPS garnered four stars in progress based on growth of students compared to past state test performances. And while both districts earned two stars for achievement, TPS saw significant jumps in its percentage of students who scored proficient or higher in English and math, particularly for its third through sixth-grade cohort.
“We felt a sense of pride and proudness of our staff and our students obviously coming off of a pandemic that we've had and remote learning,” Toledo Superintendent Romules Durant said Thursday. “Obviously we came in last year trying to really gauge learning loss and we had to develop a baseline. But what you see in the report card are significant gains in a one-year period of time with our students across the board.”
The early literacy score threw off a number of school districts, which earned one (Toledo and Washington Local) and two stars this year (Bowling Green, Maumee, Rossford, and Springfield.) One factor is that some of the testing for that occurred last fall rather than in the spring, which means students were taking those assessments after returning to in-person instruction for the first time following roughly a year of virtual learning during the pandemic lockdowns, TPS Assistant Superintendent James Gant said.
It’s been two years since the Ohio Department of Education issued grades on district report cards because of disruptions from the coronavirus pandemic. The new system is the result of a law passed last year by the Ohio General Assembly that also changed the formula for how grades, or stars, are calculated, with student achievement and year-over-year progress given the same weight, but with achievement weighing twice as much as other categories, such as gap closing, early literacy, and graduation.
Prior to the changes, school district leaders have criticized the school report card in part because the A-F letter grades assigned didn’t align with the traditional understanding of what those grades meant. For example, a “C” grade was considered below average on the state report card rather than average.
Some groups, such as the Ohio Education Association, praised the report card changes, adding it’s a fairer assessment compared to the previous iterations and the star-rating system is more informative. But Washington Local Superintendent Kadee Anstadt said while she agrees they are informative in some aspects, they’re not an effective assessment of school districts overall.
For example, she said it’s difficult to measure progress off of last year’s testing cohort when, the year prior, many students didn’t take the tests, which means there isn’t a good baseline with which to compare. Other factors that likely affected results are higher student absence rates, missed days because of quarantines, and — as mentioned by Mr. Gant — a first-time return to in-person learning.
“And I know that no matter when this is, it's going to be a measure of poverty,” Ms. Anstadt said. “If we go through the zip codes, I don't think we'll see any difference between stars and letter grades.
“But last year wasn't the year of all the years that you could have taken a snapshot and said this means something,” she added. “In the end, this is a marathon and nobody looks back at mile 10 and says, ‘Whoo, man, that took her 15 minutes, so she failed that marathon,’ they look at how I finish — and in the end, when our kids get to the finish line, our kids do great.”
Check out the school rankings below. Further information can be found on the Ohio State Department of Education website here.
First Published September 15, 2022, 3:43 p.m.
