Educators speaking at a State House briefing last week said the state’s school ranking system and local turnaround practices force struggling schools to adopt counterproductive reforms that undermine the interests of students.
When to intervene
Under federal law, the state Department of Elementary and Secondary Education must identify its lowest performing schools, but has some freedom in how to do so and when to introduce interventions. Under DESE’s current system, schools performing in the lowest 20 percent of all schools statewide are ranked Level 3, 4 or 5. When a school is drops from Level 3 to Level 4, the state requires the local school district to produce a turnaround plan for it. If that plan fails to produce sufficient and rapid enough change, the state may declare it Level 5 and take it over.
Some say that aid should be provide before schools hit Level 4, in order to nip problems in the bud and head off initiation of the more drastic changes of a turnaround process, such as staff overhaul.
During the panel, Trinity Kelly, a rising senior at Excel High, called for earlier attention to school needs. She said Excel fell into Level 4 status after its funding and special education programming were reduced. Between Fiscal Year 2016 and Fiscal year 2017, Excel’s budget declined by $200,000 and its specialized autism program was removed from school offerings, a Boston Public Schools spokesperson told the Banner.
“When we were Level 3, I think we probably should have gotten more money, not money taken away from us last year,” Kelly said. “Politicians and the school board don’t really pay attention to the schools until they are completely failing.”
Liza Veto, BPS director of turnaround and transformation, told the Banner there are some interventions offered for Level 3 schools. This year those supports include additional learning time offered during school breaks, tutoring and additional professional development, and are provided thanks to a $450,000 state grant.
How to intervene
Boston Public Schools superintendents often have elected to require all staff at a Level 4 school to reapply for their position as part of the turnaround process. Veto told the Banner the practice frees superintendents to select only the best candidates for a position, and make rapid changes.
However, students and staff speaking during the panel say this can miss the mark. Mass dismissals are demoralizing, they say, and can result in the loss of valuable teachers. For students such as Kelly it means being at a loss to find a teacher familiar enough with her to write a college recommendation. Dave Williams, a teacher from Southbridge Public Schools and president of the Southbridge Education Association, said when his district went into turnaround the high teacher turnover created a climate of instability that interfered with students’ ability to focus and pushed parents to move their children to other schools. Williams’ entire school district was put into state receivership, but he said that the fixes applied seemed to be part of a standard set of interventions and not tailored to the district-specific problems.
Veto said that a school does sometimes lose educators who may decide for personal or professional reasons that they do not wish to take on the working climate and demands of a turnaround school. Additionally, she said that while the process disrupts school culture and community, it allows for building a new culture focused on high expectations and collaborative leadership that aids school improvements.
“Part of the work of school turnaround is creating a new culture and climate at the school,” Veto said. “That building of a new team of adults and new environment for the students is a critical foundation of the school turnaround.”
Turnaround status also comes with an influx of money to the school. However, Kelly said Excel’s new funding amounted only to a restoration of the money that was cut.
“We just got back the money we lost last year. Including with inflation, we need more money to function regularly than we have right now,” Kelly said.
Determining rankings
DESE states online that it sorts schools into Levels 1 through 5 based on factors such as student growth, graduation and dropout rates, attendance and chronic absenteeism and success at narrowing proficiency gaps. But some say the rating system misjudges schools.
Speaking during the panel, Gina Sheehan, a Dearborn STEM Academy teacher, said that the ranking system emphasizes test scores more than student growth, which may obscure when schools are making strides. As such, DESE may get the signal that a school needs drastic intervention when it really just needs more time for its improvements to be result in bolstered test scores.
The state ranking also does not capture instances in which a school’s low test scores are due to recently acquiring a large population of higher-need students, who need more years of learning to get up to speed on testing, said Kristen Leathers, a Brighton High School teacher. For instance, Brighton High gained many English language learners, who can take seven or more years to attain academic proficiency in English. Yet these students still may be required to take the MCAS within months of enrollment. As such, if test scores are below that of other schools, it may reflect a change in the level of student needs rather than a slide in teaching, she said.
“The current accountability system unfairly targets schools with high proportions of English language learners and high need students,” Leathers said.
Panelist Aveann Bridgemohan has a child in the Mattahunt, which is due to close this month. Bridgemohan said the school offered some community-specific merits that seemed to go unrecognized by education officials. These included 7 a.m. to 8 p.m. wraparound services which made life easier on the many parents working four jobs, and swimming lessons, which were added after multiple instances of children drowning in Haiti when spending summers with relatives on the island, she said. Speaking from the audience, Monty Neil, executive director of the National Center for Fair and Open Testing, suggested that rankings be based on a broader array of factors such as suspension and discipline rates and school climate.
March 2017 DESE documents show officials contemplating new methods for assessing and ranking school performance. The documents show an intention that the assessment process be straightforward so that school leaders easily understand how to improve their scores.
DESE officials recommend school assessment focus on several aspects: academic achievement; graduation rates; and closing gaps for ELL students, special educations students and economically disadvantages students. Potential further aspects include attendance rates, dropout rates and student’s completion of broad and challenging curriculums.
DESE officials acknowledge of stakeholder interest in assessing schools based in part on offerings of arts, physical education, advanced coursework, computer science and career development education. But they say it is better to keep the ranking system simple and focused on core academic subjects. Instead, DESE officials proposed publicizing such additional information to publicize such information in the form of school and district profiles.
