A new set of report cards and ratings for public schools in Missouri now give parents more information at their fingertips than ever before to compare quality and effectiveness — that is, if they care to look.
As much as education policy has been driven by test scores during the last decade, research says that most parents shop schools for their children based on other, more subjective factors. It could be sports, a school’s art and music programs or even just the “feel†of the place that might prompt a family to relocate to a different school and neighborhood.
For Michele Willis, it was a strong sense of community. She walks her daughter, Mia, a few blocks from their home every day to Avery Elementary with many from their Webster Groves neighborhood. Mia, a second-grader, is happy at her school, and so are her parents.
People are also reading…
“It just feels like you’re going back in time,†Willis said. “Everybody knows everybody’s kids, and you know the parents.â€
But if so-called test-score hawks were to judge Avery solely on its performance on state standardized tests in recent years, those numbers alone could be cause for concern.
Once a top performer in the district with 74 percent of its students passing the math portion of the Missouri Assessment Program, or MAP, tests, that number steadily declined to 55 percent in 2012, the same as the state average. Nearby in Kirkwood that year, the district’s lowest-performing elementary school had 72 percent passing.
This year’s results at Avery saw improvement, with about 63 percent scoring proficient or advanced. And the state’s new report card rewarded the school for those gains, giving it a high score. Willis, a former teacher herself, has been mindful of the results during her daughter’s time at the school. But it never swayed her feelings about Avery.
“I remember thinking, ‘Holy smokes, that is low,’†Willis said of a meeting in 2012 where the principal presented the scores to parents. “At the same time, they were on top of it. Of course, they’re doing what’s best for our school. And you also don’t want to be in a place where they are just drilling the test.â€
Recent research adds to the notion that standardized exam performance may not play a strong role in parents’ satisfaction with their child’s school — which is generally quite high.
A 2013 PDK/Gallup poll found that most Americans gave the public schools in their community an A or B. The same poll found that just 22 percent think increased testing helps school performance.
A more recent poll by the Thomas Fordham Institute tried to uncover what drives parents to pick certain schools for their children. The results, released last month, show that just 23 percent of respondents cited high scores as their biggest factor in selecting a school.
The study broke down parents in to different groups when it comes to their school decisions — which often drive decisions to relocate to a new neighborhood. Some parents, for example, are “multiculturalists,†who select schools based on diversity. Others are “pragmatists,†who are seeking job and vocational offerings. Then there are “expressionists,†who value arts and music programs.
ÌýÌý | |
ÌýÌý | Interactive: School MAP scores |
ÌýÌý | ÌýÌý |
Those findings square with the choices parents appear to be making at school districts in the region that allow students to transfer to other schools within the district. In many cases, the most popular schools for transfer requests are not the ones with the highest scores on standardized exams.
Officials say parents instead make decisions based on convenience or special programming at different schools.
Sarah Booth Riss, superintendent of the Webster Groves School District, said “people really want a well-rounded education for their child ... If you ask parents, ‘What is your top priority for your children?’ I’m thinking they wouldn’t say, ‘I want them to do well on the MAP test.’â€
And yet, Missouri — like many states — is headed the opposite direction, offering parents increasingly more intricate data to rate the quality of schools.
MAKING COMPARISONS
Last month, Missouri unveiled a new sophisticated rating system that judges schools on a litany of performance measures. Schools and districts are judged against more rigorous standards, which look for improvement from year to year and among disadvantaged students.
The ratings boil down that information into five categories, which include academic achievement, attendance rate and college and career or high school readiness. In the end, school districts and individual schools are labeled with a percentage score — from 1 to 100 — reflecting the ratio of standards they met.
Missouri Education Commissioner Chris Nicastro has praised the new rating scale for both giving parents practical and understandable single number to rate their schools.
The idea behind that kind of simple number is that it would help parents and the public make finer distinctions in school quality. The new score replaces a system in which dozens of school districts in the region — such as Brentwood, Francis Howell and Pattonville — had perfect marks from the state.
Now the scores show a wider range, with Brentwood scoring 100 percent, Francis Howell 96.4 percent and Pattonville 82.9 percent. Similar comparisons can be made between individual schools.
It’s too soon to say whether the new ratings may make parents in the region more attuned to school performance. But there’s no question the ratings will add pressure to school administrators, since they will drive whether school districts are accredited with the state.
THE RIGHT BALANCE
Bill Senti knows the pressures principals face when it comes to state test scores. And he knows how efforts to improve those scores can turn off parents, who value more than just a school’s numbers.
When he arrived as principal last year at Craig Elementary School in the Parkway district, the school was one of the district’s lowest performers on math and reading exams.
Those scores, he found, were stressing out the school. One mother told him early in the school year that her third-grade child was nervous about state exams.
“No child should be thinking like that,†Senti said.
Senti responded with an approach to address those negative feelings, while seeking to improve performance. He continued extra help for students in literacy, added programs in math, and also focused on building the school’s culture.
Every staff member is a assigned to shepherd a group of 10 students, from the day they start kindergarten to the when they leave as fifth-graders. Framed photos of the so-called “owl families†— named for the Craig mascot — hang near the entrance to the school.
PTO President Cathy Kinamore, who has had kids at Craig Elementary for the last 10 years, said that Senti has struck the right balance of having high expectations for students without making them afraid of failure.
“I think the most important thing is when any kid walks in their school, they feel safe and excited to bet there,†she said. “It really feels like a family, and that just brings a comfort to them.â€
Senti has even won over of one the school’s harshest critics.
Craig parent Rachael Carpenter was so disillusioned by the school’s intense focus on standardized exams that she pulled her daughter out of the school and home-schooled her for fifth grade.
“My major concern was that her confidence and her academic achievement was being slighted because of this,†Carpenter said.
Now, following the changes at Craig, Carpenter’s daughter is in a Parkway middle school, and her son is in first grade at Craig. The school is re-energized, she said.
And the test scores? State data shows that while Craig Elementary hasn’t seen a huge spike in performance, it did show gains in communications arts and science in the 2012-13 school year — even as math scores dipped.
STUDENT-CENTERED
Some education experts say that being attuned to temperament of a student may have as much to say about a school’s quality as any test score.
Terry Heick, a blogger for , said parents should pay attention to the curiosity a student demonstrates outside of the classroom. Inside the school during class visit, parents can see the activity level of students and get an idea of whether most lessons are teacher- or student-centered, he said.
Willis, the Avery mom, agrees.
“Go to the building. See what it’s like,†she said. “You can be in the very best district, but if your kid has a bad teacher, that can affect everything.â€
At Avery, the improvement on test scores wasn’t without work.
Principal Tony Arnold, new to the school last year, saw the need for improvement. He designed a new schedule that gave teachers more time to work together, and every student, no matter their level, received extra minutes of math each week.
Parents helped, too — by getting a volunteer each day to help with lunch duties, it freed up teacher time.
“Every kid gets what they need,†Arnold said. “We want to continue to see that kind of growth.â€
And even before scores improved this year, it didn’t seem to deter parents. The school’s enrollment has increased. Arnold has taken calls from district parents who are not within the attendance boundaries, based on what they’re hearing from others.
They want to know: “Can we come?â€