Late last month, Matthew DiCarlo pointed out several irrationalities in Florida’s accountability scheme for schools. In response, earlier this week Matthew Ladner argued that Florida’s system pushed schools to educate poor children much better. Ladner essentially presents a “proof of the pudding is in the tasting” argument.
Just a few observations before the next college visit starts:
- Dear Mr. DiCarlo, the weirdness of jerry-built accountability systems is a feature, not a bug. Ladner correctly observes that within a few years of the establishment of the basic structure, the majority of schools (especially elementary schools) were achieving “A” or “B” designations. This ability to satisfy the politics of the system made it much more palatable than if the majority of all schools were “D” or “F” — and the pressures of superintendents about half a decade ago started to push the state board to modify the high school systems to make it easier for high schools to receive higher designations.
- Dear Mr. Ladner, if Florida’s system of assigning letter grades is universally stupendous, what accounts for the differential effects at different grade levels? I have some hypotheses that hinge less on the letter designations and more on the “blocking and tackling” issues of policy (to wit, reading coaches and the FCRR).
One of the things that the DiCarlo and Ladner debate focus on is what constituted student “growth.”
Ladner presented this scenario: “On growth, if a kid scores below basic in one year and below basic the next year, it seems entirely possible that the kid didn’t know anything about math in either year. It would be rather perverse to have it possible to literally score 0% correct in one year, zero percent the next year and get credit for growth.
On the other hand, if he or she scores proficient in one year and proficient in the next it seems credible to me that the student has gained knowledge of math in a progressively more challenging set of curriculum.”
Maybe Matt could quantify these effects from existing data in one of his luxurious scatter graphs. It would be interesting to see, using year-to-year “raw” scores, how “basic” is defined operationally for these groups (i.e., raw scores against year-to-year variances, showing cut-offs). How many students in math belong to the zero-zero group, the zero-to-proficient group, the proficient-to-not group, and proficient-to-proficient group?
But an even bigger problem is this: how does anyone expect buy-in if there are these kinds of questions outstanding?
Is it more important to have a flawed system (and what accountability system is not flawed?) that clearly signals achievement or the lack (regardless of how it is constructed), or a complicated system that no one trusts?