Get Out of Program Improvement by Changing Kids

April 28, 2008 by dave

This Sacramento Bee story blew me away. While I personally suspected that this happens more often than we'd like to admit, it is very troubling to see it being described in the Sacramento Bee.

Will C. Wood Middle School faced a vexing situation when last year's test results came out in August. Most students had met the mark set by No Child Left Behind. But African American students' math scores fell far short of it, bringing the school into failing status in the eyes of the federal law.

One hundred students were categorized as black when they took the test last spring. But if the school had fewer than 100 students in that group, their low scores wouldn't count. So Principal Jim Wong reviewed the files of all the students classified as African American on the test, he said, and found that four of them had indicated no race or mixed race on their enrollment paperwork. Wong sent his staff to talk to the four families to ask permission to put the kids in a different racial group.

"You get a kid that's half black, half white. What are you going to put him down as?" Wong said. "If one kid makes the difference and I can go white, that gets me out of trouble."

Over the past two years, 80 California schools got "out of trouble" with No Child Left Behind after changing the way they classify their students, a Bee analysis has found. The changes nudged their status from failing to passing under the federal law.

To me what troubles me the most is that the focus is on what is best for the school, not what is best for the kids. The school takes a kid who has been "African American" for all of their academic career and then reclassifies them as "white" for this year because it drops the total number of African American students below the "significant subgroup" threshold, so the school is no longer held accountable for the academic performance of that group. Those students didn't magically get smarter, the school just "cheated" and changed the conditions of the test in order to get out of trouble.

Of course the district denied that they made this change to escape accountability and is quick to insist that the parents agreed. Well, of course they did. Parents love their local schools and they want to help them. So, if calling my kid white instead of African American "helps" my school, I'm there. After all, it is us (the school and parents) against the evil Bush administration's NCLB which is trying to call our great school a failure. The administrators are counting on the love of the parents for the local school.

Appel, the Burbank principal, said the important thing is not whether schools are correcting data but whether they are helping students learn more.

At his school, test scores have gone up over the past five years – steeply in math, more gradually in English. After making data corrections this year, Burbank was removed from the list of schools facing No Child Left Behind's consequences.

"The way to get out is not by making data corrections," Appel said. "The way to get out is to improve student achievement."

I agree with the principal's last statement. You don't get out of Program Improvement by "making data corrections." Not in the long term. However, as Burbank High has proven, it works in the short-term.

While I thought the bulk of the article was pretty good, the reporter completely blew it here at the end. She takes the school's word for their rising test scores. Check out these charts from Just for the Kids - California:

Language Arts:

Mathematics:

While the school claims math scores have risen "steeply", their English/Language Arts scores are basically the same. The African American subgroup, the one the school is trying to avoid accountability for, has actually declined by 4.2 percentage points from 2002 to 2007. Overall, test scores for the entire school have only risen by 4 percentage points from 2002 to 2007 in Language Arts.

While the overall math scores have increased by nearly 26 percentage points , the African American scores have only increased from 10% to 23.8% from 2002 to 2007. The increase in scores for the African American students is about half of the overall gain in scores. There is still a huge gap between African American and white student scores.

In my mind, the school needs to focus less effort on changing students and more on actually changing instructional strategies to help all students succeed. Until they do that, they're going to continue to deny that they actually can make a difference.

Permalink