MISIP 5 Formally Approved for Implementation This Fall

The Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE) gave their final presentation to the State Board of Education regarding the Missouri School Improvement Program (MISIP) this week. The plan includes all of the tools for measuring school and teacher performance to help each district prepare their Annual Performance Report (APR) which is a tool used by the state to determine a school district's accreditation.

"Schools will have multiple ways of achieving the standards including showing student progress and/or evidence of student growth. Because accreditation is based on multiple years of data, MSIP 5 will be used for accreditation purposes beginning in the 2014-2015 school year. School and district APRs generated during the transition from MSIP 4 to MSIP 5 will be used to inform each school and district of its progress toward meeting or exceeding the state targets."

The main stream press has provided few details on the program, so we are providing more detail here from the presentation made to the SBE.

 MISIP5 Policy Goals

• Promote Continuous Improvement and Innovation 
• Establish the State's Expectations
• Distinguish Performance of Schools and Districts
• Empower All Stakeholders

 MISIP Performance Standards will cover the usual:

• Academic Achievement
• Subgroup Achievement
• College and Career Readiness (K-12 only)
• High School Readiness (K-8 only)
• Attendance Rate
• Graduation Rate (K-12 only) 

The plan also calls for regional meetings to:

• Identify Lowest 5% performing schools and provide drastic intervention and assistance
• Ensure EVERY school is “Good Enough”
• Ensure EVERY school Gets Better

DESE's vision of accountability

 

Note - Even DESE calls the upcoming Common Core Standards Federal Standards. Local districts are responsible for formative assessments which tell the teacher whether the students are learning the material so he/she can make adjustments within the unit.

The rest of the presentation simply demonstrates that they are trying very hard to quantify the means of deciding whether or not the school system is working. Eating a bowl of granola will provide less crunching than the numbers generated for school performance.

One  significant change is that the metric will now use multiple years of data to measure academic performance which is meant to reduce volatility. In addition, Subgroups (which include ethnicity, English Language Learners, Free & Reduced Lunch etc.) will be reported on individually with separate targets (in some cases,) although accountability will be applied to a supersubgroup so that no individual subgroup will be systematically eliminated due to its small size.  This last requirement is meant to level the playing field between districts.

To view the full presentation click here. 

At 100 pages, the presentation is a lot to cover. In a Nancy Pelosi-esque way, we will have to start using the system in order to see what is in the system and whether it works as designed.

If accountability is so great for teachers, why don't we apply it to legislators too?

A couple weeks ago very few people outside of Perrin-Whitt Consolidated Independent School District knew who John Kuhn, their superintendent, was. His letter to several Texas legislators, now known as The Alamo Letter, has changed that and added another perspective to the debate on what is wrong with today’s education. The letter basically calls on the legislators to stop pandering to big business at the expense of education funding. It also points out that continued accountability (i.e. testing) requirements come at the expense of less money for teachers. The financial situation in Texas is slightly different from that of Missouri although both states are facing declining state income in a struggling economy.

A follow up interview with Mr. Kuhn provided to Anthony Cody of Ed Week provided some additional thoughts that are far more universal. He spoke about the problems with accountability and how it has led TX to focus on just four main areas of study; math, science, social studies, and language arts. Not surprisingly these are the four main areas where standardized tests are available or required. He went on to suggest that if accountability were really so great we would apply it to all public servants. “Why do we not require our legislators to make ‘Adequate Yearly Progress?’ We have the data from their congressional districts, do we not? There is crime data, health care data, poverty figures, and drug use statistics for every state and federal legislative district. Why, exactly, do we not establish annual targets for our legislators to meet?” He says that if fixing all the problems in education were possible simply by applying accountability, then that same accountability applied to government would “eliminate 100% of poverty, crime, drug abuse, and preventable illness by 2014!”

He notes that lack of accountability does not explain the continued success in other areas of education not covered by common assessments.

Therefore, the only saving grace in the arts and foreign languages and vocational classes and athletics is that we have passionate people teaching those subjects who really care about their students and their subjects. And that is the core of my disdain for this ugly baby called accountability--if the test-and-label philosophy really worked, then you would think there would be far worse teaching going on outside the core classes, but there isn't generally. Why? Because good teachers are motivated by passion and a moral sense of mission, not by the threats of absent bureaucrats.

Mr. Kuhn also characterized the narrative of the school reform movement as, “a simple formula: kids are victims, teachers are the villains, and some administrator is the messianic hero. A dynamic personality comes into a bad school and doesn't accept mediocrity. He or she cleans up the discipline and fires all the bad teachers, confronting the wicked teachers' union along the way.” This sounds great and, as he says, sells books, but it also, “relies on the same dangerous logic that tyrants use to justify lording over peasants and restricting their liberties. In this case, the benign dictator is a self-promoting principal or superintendent with all the answers, and the poor clueless peasants in dire need of a paternalistic leader are the teachers.”

It is worth it to read the entirety of the Ed Week interview. Mr. Kuhn notes that other superintendents have contacted him to offer their support and thanks for saying what many of them have been thinking. The simple fixes that legislators and reformers promote, or in some cases force down our throats, are often anything but simple for those who have to carry them out. The real world is less simple and more messy. In the real world, students’ families struggle with poverty, crime, poor health care and addiction. All these societal influences can make it difficult for children to learn and nothing but a superman of a teacher is going to get children from the worst of these situations to a four-year college. For some, a good sustainable life may simply be growing up to raise a family, go to church and hold a local manual labor job. We are heading towards a definition of successful education that would deem such a person a failure and penalize the system for not making them be otherwise.