Early School Accountability Details Raise More Questions

Minnesota’s new school-accountability system has officials wondering how they’ll explain an often confusing—and still incompletely understood—system to parents and others in the community.

Diane Schimelpfenig, director of teaching, learning and assessment, explained on Thursday the highlights of how schools will be measured now that Minnesota is exempt from the No Child Left Behind law.

Minnesota requested a waiver from No Child Left Behind last year, laying out a plan in its place to reduce the achievement gap over the next six years. President Barack Obama announced Feb. 9 that Minnesota would be one of 10 states to receive a waiver from the federal education law.

Officials like Schimelpfenig have received briefings on how the new system will work, and her presentation Thursday gave the public a good framework of what to expect.

Yet many of the details remain unknown—and School Board directors were skeptical about some of the details that are known.

Here’s a look at those details.

What won’t change

Academic standards

Public reporting

The tests: Students will still be tested, and the state will continue to use the Minnesota Comprehensive Assessments. Hopkins national test instead.

Adequate Yearly Progress: The be-all, end-all measurement of the former No Child Left Behind system is still around; it just doesn’t have the single-focus prominence it once did. More on that later.

What will change

Fewer restrictions on money

The waiver will allow schools to put more money into classrooms that schools once had to direct elsewhere.

Under No Child Left Behind, schools had to offer parents the option of enrolling their children in another school if their school didn’t meet its targets. With the waiver, that’s no longer required—which should save Hopkins about $65,000 in transportation costs. The district will also save $125,000 by no longer having to offer outside tutoring to low-income students.

“It’s significant amounts of money that will no longer be required for these set-asides,” Schimelpfenig said.

Let go of AYP, embrace MMR

The new system gives all schools a score called a “Multiple Measure Rating”—pretty much guaranteed to dominate school accountability conversations in the way adequate yearly progress has to this point. There are four components to this rating:

• Proficiency: Incorporates the existing adequate yearly progress measurement, with results broken down into different student subgroups.
• Student growth: Measures how much schools helped students improve from one year to the next.
• Achievement gap closure: Measures the ability of schools to coax faster growth from traditionally underperforming subgroups by comparing the growth of the lower-performing groups at a school to the statewide average for higher-performing subgroups. For example, students of color would be compared to white students or students receiving free and reduced lunches would be compared to those who are not receiving them.
• Graduation rate: Currently aims for an 85 percent graduation rate, although the targets are changing next year. Hopkins has a 95 to 96 percent graduation rate, so Schimelpfenig doesn’t expect the district to have any trouble in this area.

Each one of these categories is worth 25 points. Most elementary and middle schools will be able to get a maximum of 75 points. Most high schools will be able to get a maximum of 100 points. The “MMR” will be the percentage of points a school gets out of the maximum.

Feel-good labels

Throughout the history of No Child Left Behind, educators chaffed at the way it labeled schools as “failing” when they didn’t meet proficiency targets. Well, no more. The waiver system creates a handful of categories—some good, some bad, none overtly critical. The categories only apply to so-called “Title I schools,” which have higher concentrations of students receiving free and reduced lunch. Hopkins has four Title I schools: , , and . The categories are:

• Reward schools: The top 15 percent of Title I schools.
• Celebration schools: The next 25 percent of Title I schools may apply to be designated a celebration school. Of those that apply, 10 percent will actually be selected as celebration schools. Schools don’t yet know what the application will involve or what they’ll be asked.
• Continuous improvement schools: The bottom 25 percent of Title I schools will receive this designation.
• Priority schools: The bottom 5 percent of Title I schools will receive this designation. It nests within the continuous improvement designation.
• Focus schools: This designation will go to 10 percent of schools in “the middle” that have “extreme achievement gaps.” It’s not clear yet what exactly “the middle” means.   

It’s also not clear what these categories will actually mean for schools. The worst-performing schools may need to submit lengthier reports, Schimelpfenig said, but there’s no money attached to the designations.

“Do we have any idea why these labels need to exist and their value?” asked School Board Director Kris Newcomer.

“I’m sorry, we don’t,” Schimelpfenig answered.

New messages to communicate

In the past, No Child Left Behind requirements meant districts often had to kick off the school year with the morale-sucking practice of notifying parents that their children’s schools didn’t meet AYP targets.

That’s not going to happen under the new waiver system.

Yet districts will have to educate parents on a whole new vocabulary of school accountability. There are MMRs and AYPs. There are priority schools and reward schools. And—perhaps most confusing of all to the public—there will be many schools in the middle that don’t have any designation.

Schultz and Schimelpfenig still remain optimistic about the new waiver system. It frees up money and has a more positive tone than before. But throughout Thursday’s discussion, School Board directors reflected that they’ve got a significant communications task ahead of them.

“I guess you have to be careful what you ask for,” said Director Irma McIntosh Coleman.