Missouri Scales Up Accreditation

Is DESE trying to inject a little competition into the school system with their new accreditation program?

The short version of the change in their program is that they are moving from a 14 point scale to a 150 point scale. In the past, schools who got 13/14 points received accreditation.  Now they must receive at least 105/150 to be accredited. Districts receiving between 75-104 points will have provisional accreditation. As further incentive, districts who receive more than 90% of the points will be "accredited with distinction."

Why the change? The claim is that the new system will "intensify pressure on low-performing school districts to improve, while exposing even the best schools to new scrutiny from parents and the public."  In fact, districts will now be able to compete more because their will be a wide range of scores in the accredited column. DESE plugged three years worth of data into the new system to give districts an idea of how they would rate.  The examples given in the Post Disptach were Mehlville, Parkway, Pattonville and Rockwood. All three had perfect scores under the old rating, but under the new scale their scores would be  97.9, 98.2, 87.5 and 96.8 percent, respectively, based on this latest performance data.

Everyone keeps saying competition among the schools is good. The new system begins to look a little like Olympic scoring where bragging rights can depend on the tenth of a point earned in some small aspect of the grading. Lower performing schools have many more areas they can work on to up their scores which, in theory, should help them.

Unfortunately for lower performing schools, like St. Louis City schools, the reality is that the new system will probably strip away their newly acquired provisional accreditation. It could be because, and the comments in the Dispatch seem to support, some of the new categories to be rated contain bias against districts like St. Louis Public Schools.

Take the new way they will calculate attendance rate. Under the old system, schools supplied the percentage of kids in school daily. The new system requires districts to calculate what percentage of students are in school 90% of the time to focus on the kids who are missing the most school. To increase their score, the districts are going to have to find a way get those kids to come to school.

Suburban school districts, whose parents typically have more education and are more tuned in to their children's education have very good attendance rates no matter which way they are calculated. Urban district families face a host of problems which impact whether or not children attend school. Parents typically have less education. Many pay less attention to their children's education as a result. One Fergusson/Florissant parent wrote, "I have witnessed a very competent teacher who after she had a terse encounter with a parent throw her arms up and exclaim publicly for all nearby to hear, 'How can we expect kids to learn when these are the parents in our school?' "

Children's home life can be chaotic making getting to school challenging. Health care, for now, may be missing causing more illness. These and other factors endemic to urban life affect how many and how often kids attend school. I find it a little scary that anyone wants to give schools the power to impact these things. That seems well beyond the current authority of a school district. I would also expect this point in the accreditation process to be a constant point of contention for urban districts who will rightly note that they are penalized more for this than their suburban counterparts.

The new system was a bit of a shock for administrators. It set the bar higher. But with Missouri ranking 41st in the nation in the Ed Week 2013 Quality Counts Report, change would appear necessary. Setting our sites on a higher rating by Ed Week means hitting the categories noted in the chart below. Ed Week, funded by the Gates Foundation, is in essence telling states, these are the things they need to focus on.

Source: Ed Week Quality Counts 2013

The other shift in focus of the new system is onto individual students and their achievement, making sure they leave the district college or career ready, rather than the overall results for district. Yet ironically, what seems to be missing in DESE's and Ed Week's rating systems is the role of the student. Teachers are accountable, administrators are accountable, state legislatures are accountable, but the student is merely raw material put through the system to be transformed by the system into whatever the state needs. It's hard to see how scores in lower performing districts are going to change when the consumer of what they are offering has no accountability and no incentive to change their behavior.

The Accreditation Game

If you live in or around St. Louis you are very familiar with the crisis created when St. Louis Public Schools lost their accreditation from the Missouri State Board of Education. Loss of accreditation is meant to send a message to the school district, "You really need to do better."

For the individual student the consequences are less dramatic. They still receive a diploma. They are still eligible for all scholarships they would otherwise be eligible for. While they might, in theory, have a harder time qualifying for college admissions, MO DESE says it "has not identified any instance where a student who graduated from an unaccredited school district has been disqualified from consideration for admission." So where might they feel a pinch?

If they play a sport the Missouri State High School Activities Association (MSHSAA) provides that students who transfer schools or do not meet the requirements for residency upon enrollment at the school are ineligible for 365 days unless they meet one or more exceptions.  There is an exception for students transferring from an unaccredited public school:

 A student may be eligible upon his or her first transfer from an unaccredited public school to an accredited public school where the student’s tuition is required by state law to be paid by the home district provided the transfer does not involve undue influence and is not for athletic reasons.  Likewise, a student may be eligible upon his/her first transfer back to his/her home school if the school regains accreditation provided: 1. the student transfers within 365 days of accreditation being regained and 2. the transfer does not involve undue influence and is not for athletic reasons.

As the Turner Decision showed, the other consequence for students is that they become eligible to transfer to an adjacent accredited district, provided the moon and the stars line up just right to allow that to happen.

James V. Shuls, the new education policy analyst at the Show-Me Institute wrote in a piece for The Missouri Record, "the state’s board of education has set the bar for accreditation and provisional accreditation very low; so low, in fact, that the distinctions are essentially meaningless. The distinctions are also inconsequential because they change very little for the district besides the label. And as Shakespeare noted, 'a low-performing school district by any other name would smell like a low-performing school district.'”

Susan Turk at St. Louis Schools Watch has another point of view. The distinction is not inconsequential for everyone. In a recent post she explored the State Board of Education's recent surprising turn around on its position regarding St Louis Public School District accreditation. Just one year ago they earned the required six points to regain their accreditation and it seemed the SBE was poised to give it to them. Then they made an abrupt change and said they wanted to see a two year upward trend in scores before they granted accreditation.  Yet just ten months later they have reversed themselves again and granted provisional accreditation, which DESE describes as being considered accredited. Mr. Shuls was right. It's just a label and one with very little meaning.

SLSW has a more pessimistic view. The SBE's decision comes at a time when St. Loius Mayor Slay has a challenger in the upcoming election, Lewis Reed who had reclaiming St. Louis public school accreditation as one of his main platform goals.

SLSW explained it this way,  

... Lewis Reed supports returning SLPS to the governance of the elected board of education.  He does not support the mayor controlling the SLPS.  

When the state board voted to find the SLPS unaccredited in 2007, they did so for political reasons.  They took the unprecedented step of removing accreditation not after a regularly scheduled once in 5 year accreditation review, but 2 years early. They did so because as has been documented by Wilbur C. Rich in the Winter 2008 issue of the Hoover Institute’s Education Next journal, “Mayor Slay” formed “an alliance with the governor (Blunt) to take over the schools.”

  

Mayor Slay’s sudden support for the approval of provisional accreditation for the SLPS, Dr. Adams’ and the SAB’s request for consideration of it and the state board’s approval at this time, after academic progress has slipped somewhat, only makes sense in the light of political expediency, the upcoming mayoral primary in March of 2013. Mayor Slay fearing the anger of SLPS parents, needed to take an issue away from Lewis Reed. 

So while accreditation has little impact on the students, it has huge impact, and political capital, for many others: the mayor, adjacent district superintendents, and parents.  Right now it is just a game.

It is important to remember what accreditation is supposed to accomplish.  It is supposed to assure parents that the services and operations of educational institutions are of an acceptable quality. Hence the provision that if a district loses its accreditation parents may apply to have their child attend another accredited district. This is parent choice based on information supplied by some outside agency that is supposed to be trustworthy. In the case of SLPS that can be debated. 

The Show Me Institute report made a useful suggestion based on this understanding of the purpose of accreditation. Such a rating system should allow parents to know how the actual school they send their child to is performing. The current system only tells them how the schools in their district, as an aggregate, perform. The magnet schools in St. Louis have helped pull up the districts scores, while the scores at individual schools remain dismally low. If parents are to be able to make an informed decision about where they send their child, the individual school should receive the accreditation or rating. Mr. Shuls recommends a report card type system. 

"The current system pre-supposes that the state can hold schools accountable by accrediting the school district, when in reality, school accountability is best achieved when families are allowed to hold their child’s school accountable," he writes. This would give parents useful information and remove the political capital inherent in the current district accreditation process. Not bad. It also means, at least in theory, that fewer students would be eligible for transfer at any one time since only individual schools would fit into that scenario. Parents with more ability to hold their individual school accountable might have better success at changing it and keeping their kids there which would be preferable to moving their kids out of their local district.

Too bad we're headed in the other direction with less and less local control and more control coming from Washington DC. But we can always dream.