DC officials look to hone new school report cards for December release

By the end of the year, parents will be able to compare all the public schools in the District — both traditional and charter — using one tool. But with work on a final design underway, the inclusion of a one- to five-star rating for each school continues to stir debate over the propriety of boiling down the data that way.

The school report card is required as part of the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), a federal law passed in 2015 to replace No Child Left Behind, which was often criticized for its strong focus on testing and teacher evaluations.

Although the report card is required as part of each state’s ESSA plan, states have a great deal of power over how it will be designed.

As DC’s state education agency, the Office of the State Superintendent of Education (OSSE) is responsible for implementing ESSA and for designing the school report cards in conjunction with the elected DC State Board of Education.

Since early 2017, OSSE and the State Board of Education, with support from members of the board’s volunteer ESSA Advisory Task Force, have organized community listening sessions to get feedback from the parents and other stakeholders.

“The information needs to reflect what people need to make these decisions,” said Karen Williams, president of the State Board of Education and the Ward 7 representative. “That’s why we’re going out to the people who actually have to use it.”

Engagement took place during two phases: The first, from October to December 2017, focused on the content and data points used to measure the schools. These were voted on and approved by the State Board of Education in February 2018. After the vote, the second phase of engagement, focusing on the design and layout of the tool, began. This phase of community feedback ends this summer.

The most recent report from OSSE announced that during the first phase they engaged with more than 1,900 members of the community. A third of these community members were contacted via outreach by Parents Amplifying Voices in Education (PAVE), a local education advocacy organization.

Although OSSE did not have data on how many people they engaged with during the second phase, they conducted numerous in-person events as well as an online survey promoted by State Board of Education members and community organizations.

Despite the outreach efforts, many people remain dissatisfied with the proposed report cards.

“I think OSSE wants to convince the public that they’re listening, even though they aren’t,” said Becky Reina, a parent and member of the Ward 1 Education Collaborative.

The controversy lies in a new accountability feature, the School Transparency and Reporting system, known as the STAR framework. STAR is part of OSSE’s strategic plan and ESSA implementation.

Under this framework, each school will receive an annual, summative rating based on a predetermined calculation and metrics that will translate into a star rating — one to five — on the report card.

Although no one in the community, on the school board or on the ESSA Task Force has seen the final ratings, many people believe they already know how they will turn out.

“Inevitably … some of the poorest schools that have large numbers of students from poor families are going to get a ‘one’ rating,” said Suzanne Wells of the Capitol Hill Public Schools Parents Organization.

She compared the rating to an Amazon review, and said that just as she doesn’t want to buy products with one-star reviews, parents will not want to send their kids to a school with a one-star rating. Wells worries that this would create a vicious cycle of failure for high-poverty schools.

Ruth Wattenberg, State Board of Education representative for Ward 3, thinks that the STAR rating is misleading. “Proponents of it would argue that it makes it easy for parents to say which is a good school and which is not,” she said. “Unfortunately, it’s not accurate.”

The existence of the STAR rating frustrates many stakeholders, but so does the way the rating will be determined. The disagreement — the disputed value of standardized testing — is nothing new for those well-versed in education policy.

Test scores make up 70 percent of the STAR rating for elementary and middle schools and 50 percent of the STAR rating for high schools. (Originally the elementary-school figure was 80 percent, but it was changed following backlash from board members and the community.)

After the first phase of outreach, OSSE reported the most prominent themes that parents and other stakeholders wanted to see on the report cards: teacher data, parent engagement, college preparedness, diversity, advanced coursework, test scores and grades, and more. A number of stakeholders also stressed an interest in measuring student growth beyond test scores.

In one outreach activity, participants in the online survey and at in-person sessions were asked to rank elements that were most important to them. Although many elements are required by federal regulations, it was an opportunity to gauge how parents and other stakeholders valued each element. The one- to five-star rating was not included in the top 10 elements from either in-person or online feedback.

The lack of interest from the community prompted many people to question OSSE’s decision to place the STAR rating on every page of the proposed report-card design.

Community members have had a chance to respond to this design during the second phase of outreach, which is ongoing. OSSE, the State Board of Education and the ESSA Task Force again held in-person sessions and sent out a survey, all focused on the design and language of the report card tool. The aggregated results of these efforts have not yet been released by OSSE.

However, many people have expressed opinions similar to Cathy Reilly, president and founder of the Senior High Alliance of Parents, Principals and Educators (SHAPPE).

“You can tell that we have different values, we have different things that we’re looking for for our children,” she said. “If it was school profiles that gave you a wide palette of what to look at about a school, that makes a lot of sense. But I’m particularly concerned about the dominance of this star rating.”

At the State Board of Education’s July working session, Williams announced that the STAR rating “will not be predominantly shown,” which is what stakeholders like Reilly prefer. The final report card tool will be released in December 2018, with data from the 2017-2018 school year.

Parents can expect a tool that is user-friendly and mobile-optimized but also available on paper. Williams said that the drive toward a multi-platform tool is an attempt to give as many people as possible access to the data.

The release of the tool will not mark an end to community outreach or report card design. According to Williams, soliciting and incorporating feedback will become an annual event.

OSSE also intends to add new data elements as they become available.

“Some categories that people want to see, we just don’t have the data,” said Williams. “If there are enough people who feel that it’s important on a report card, OSSE will try to set up a trial or a pilot.”

An OSSE spokesperson declined to answer specific questions about the issues with the report cards, instead issuing a statement that underscored the office’s dedication to the matter.

“We remain committed to ongoing engagement with parents, schools, and stakeholders to ensure we are building a tool that meets the needs of our entire community,” the statement read.

The ESSA Task Force and OSSE are already working on developing measures of individual student growth in high schools and school climate to include in the future.