OKLAHOMA CITY -- At a special meeting Wednesday, the state Board of Education voted unanimously to certify school report cards calculated with a new formula for each of the state’s 1,785 public schools.
The new calculation method resulted in nearly three times as many schools with below average grades, including 163 schools that received F's compared to just 10 last year.
State Superintendent Janet Barresi told the state board members that the changes were the result higher standards and a new grade calculation method that was devised at the Capitol this spring, passed by the Legislature and signed into law by Gov. Mary Fallin.
"There has been much sound and fury from a number of quarters," Barresi said. "Some district superintendents, knowing their schools would be getting F's, tried discrediting the grading criteria.
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"Now, if these same administrators put that same degree of energy and enthusiasm into turning around their challenged school sites as they did in criticizing the grades, then I'm very optimistic about the future of these schools. Regardless, the final report cards accurately represent how Oklahoma schools are doing."
Board member Lee Baxter of Lawton said any debate about the overall system was a question for lawmakers, not the state board of education.
"The question for us is whether we release the grades or whether we don't, so the debate about A-F falls on deaf ears as far as I'm concerned. It's a legislative matter," he said.
The state board also reviewed statewide student proficiency rates from 2012-13 state tests. Barresi said on tests for students in grades 3-8 the only notable improvements were in fourth-grade reading, while Oklahoma students made gains on exit exams in Algebra I, Algebra II, geometry, and English II and III high school courses.
Calculating grades
Student proficiency rates in core subjects, as determined by state-mandated standardized tests, are converted into "performance index" scores that account for half of every school and district's grade.
The remaining 50 percent of a school's grade is determined through an analysis of how a school or district's student scores in math and reading compare to the previous year's.
Bonus points can be earned for strong rates of student attendance, graduation, participation in advanced coursework and college entrance exams, and low dropout counts.
On Tuesday, Tulsa Superintendent Keith Ballard unveiled his district's dramatically lower results and dismissed them as "flawed and completely inconsequential."
He said the new formula's growth measures failed to recognize or reward significant gains in academic achievement by students in struggling schools, and offered as evidence a half dozen Tulsa elementary schools that saw test scores increase but grades decline from D's to F's.
In TPS, 36 Tulsa schools — virtually half in the inner-city district — were branded as "F" schools, compared to just eight in 2012.
Throughout the remainder of the district, seven schools received A's, 10 B's, four C's and 17 D's.
In 2012, Oklahoma joined the dozen or so other states using an A-F grades for public school accountability, and just as in several other states, the grading methods quickly became the source of great controversy.
Oklahoma’s measure for school performance for the previous decade was the Academic Performance Index, which scored schools on a scale of zero to 1,500.
Barresi said the API was "meaningless" because most parents and other patrons were unaware of its existence, but the A-F grades have been effective in sparking greater public discussion about school quality.
Controversial system
While the A-F system was intended to make it easier to evaluate the effectiveness of public schools, many educators across the state and research scientists at the University of Oklahoma and Oklahoma State University have objected to the state’s grade calculation methods.
OU and OSU research scientists have questioned the statistical "validity, reliability and usefulness" of the system. In an analysis of first-year results, found the system "masks" the performance of poor and minority students because they tested highest in D and F schools and lowest in A and B schools.
They concluded that the most recent attempt to improve the system by the Oklahoma Legislature failed to address the most serious problems and perhaps "intensified" them.
Last week Gov. Mary Fallin’s spokesman told the Tulsa World the governor does not support the findings of the research scientists and is concerned that critics "are absolutely bent on undermining the credibility of the entire system."
Barresi on Wednesday did acknowledge some difficulties and a longer than ideal time frame for delivering the new grade cards to schools.
"This process has admittedly not been a smooth one," she said. "The initial problems stemmed from calculation errors on the department's end. Some test scores were factored in later than they should have been. And the department made more than 1,100 updates from data verification updates (because of school district requests).
"Through it all, we kept the grades online for districts to see believing full transparency was indeed the best course."
