Massachusetts’s Evaluation System for k-12 Public Schools Measures Poverty Over Performance

The rating system that DESE submitted to the US Department of Education under the new federal Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) is unfair to schools where there are high levels of poverty.

Although some states use relatively equitable formulas that factor in student growth in their ratings, Massachusetts system only counts student growth at 25% of the total score for schools.

Growth correlates more accurately to overall student achievement over time than other quantitative measures like simple achievement, which is a snapshot of what a student knows and can do in a single moment. Because growth is independent of prior student achievement, it is less correlated with poverty. Growth measures are more likely to reflect what students learn while they are in school, instead of what they come to school with on day one of kindergarten, according to a recently published study by Brandon Wright and Michael Petrilli of the Fordham Institute.

Educational and economic scholarship shows that students who grow up in poverty, enter school with fewer academic skills than students in more affluent communities. Therefore, these children perform lower on state standardized tests, especially in the younger grades. This lower performance will become part of any school’s overall score. This phenomenon shows up most visibly in rating systems that weight simple achievement higher than growth.

Throughout all the state evaluation plans that were studied recently at the Fordham Institute, there were two key indicators that were found to be used to evaluate schools. One is simple student achievement which is based on a student’s performance on state standardized tests compared to his or her peers across that state. And, the other indicator is student growth, which is based on the same standardized test score but instead comparing it to that of his or her peers, it is compared to that same student’s performance on the state test from a prior grade level. That comparison yields a growth score which can be compared to the growth scores of other children in other schools. Some states may have included other factors, besides growth or simple achievement, but these two are the heaviest in these accountability systems.

State evaluations systems vary in how they weight simple achievement and growth. If these systems overweight simple achievement when do these calculations, they are measuring more than what happens in school. They are measuring where students start as much as where they end up, and not all children have the same starting line.

Since simple achievement is strongly correlated with the acquisition of academic skill and knowledge, like vocabulary, that are often learned between birth and age five, and since low-income students tend to enter school behind children in non-poverty schools, the schools they attend end up having lower overall achievement scores. Thus, high-poverty schools rate poorly when simple achievement is weighted more than growth, no matter how good the school is or how competent its teachers are.

States like Arizona weight growth percentiles at 50% of the total scores for their schools, and Colorado weights growth percentiles at 60%. Massachusetts could do the same. Why aren’t we?

Annual school ratings must accurately assess the performance of schools. It can be done more validly. But, it won’t be done unless high-performing, high-poverty schools have a chance earn positive ratings.

Massachusetts DESE does not allow those schools, those teachers and those students who are doing good work, where students are making solid gains, to get credit for that work, especially when they are I high-poverty areas.

Under the Massachusetts evaluation system, schools that are located in areas where there is high poverty are at risk of being placed on probation, taken over by the state or even shuttered, their students forced to attend neighboring districts, their teachers and principals fired due to poor performance on this state evaluation system, even though they may have high growth rates.

You can download the study conducted at the Fordham Institute last month, from https://edexcellence.net/publications/rating-the-ratings