'Invalid and unreliable': 2016 school report cards released

Related: Board of Education OKs higher budget request, hears ideas to overhaul student testing system

Related: Last school report cards to be released before A-F system gets overhaul

VIDEO: 2016 school report cards released amid criticism of 'completely flawed' system of accountability

OKLAHOMA CITY — One final time, the Oklahoma State Department of Education released school report cards based on a much-maligned calculation method even the state’s top educator has deemed invalid and unreliable.

Across the state, there were 196 A’s, 455 B’s, 582 C’s, 319 D’s and 213 F’s this year. That means there were 16 percent more “F” schools and 8 to 9 percent fewer A and B schools, respectively.

Tulsa Public Schools reports having 45 schools with F’s, an improvement of seven schools or 10 percentage points over 2015. Kendall-Whittier, Kerr, McKinley, Mitchell, Peary elementary schools, Dual Language Immersion School and Rogers Early College Junior High all increased their grades from F’s into the D-range.

TPS Superintendent Deborah Gist called the state accountability system “completely flawed.”

“These grades are meaningless, and I think it’s important for the public to understand that for the second year, at least, they need to dismiss this information,” Gist said. “The only reason this information is even being released publicly is because it is required. It is a bureaucratic exercise. Everyone in the state — everyone — understands that this current system is not an accurate reflection of school performance in Oklahoma.”

Currently, the state’s calculation method relies on student proficiency rates on state-mandated tests for 50 percent of every school’s grade. The remaining 50 percent is determined through an analysis of how a school or district’s students 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, as well as for low dropout numbers.

State Superintendent Joy Hofmeister has been a leading critic of the state’s current school grading system, pointing most often to its “masking” of both student growth indicators, as well as troubling trends like too-low high school graduation rates.

“We have to think about what each student deserves — the advanced student deserves to grow, the student with very severe deficits in learning should have high priority placed on them just as much. And so this is something that can be addressed through the way we structure our new accountability system,” Hofmeister said after Thursday’s board meeting.

The grade cards were intended to make it easy for parents and communities to gauge the performance of public schools, but their legitimacy has been undermined by public criticism from educators and parents, as well as multiple rounds of analysis by research scientists from the University of Oklahoma and Oklahoma State University.

For several months, a 95-member Assessment and Accountability Task Force of state and local education leaders, business and Chamber of Commerce executives, and representatives of teacher and parent associations have been working on proposals to overhaul Oklahoma’s student testing and A-F school accountability systems to meet new state and federal requirements.

Still, the much-maligned A-F school report cards will likely live on.

Hofmeister said the federal Every Student Succeeds Act, which replaced the No Child Left Behind Act, offers little wiggle room on the school accountability systems every state must maintain.

While states are still waiting on the U.S. Department of Education to adopt final regulations for how they are to implement ESSA, Hofmeister said she anticipates the federal requirement for a single indicator of school performance, such as the letter grade system in Oklahoma, to persist.

The Assessment and Accountability Task Force will issue a preliminary report on a new statewide accountability system at the Nov. 15 meeting of the State Board of Education, with final recommendations presented at the December meeting. The final report must be delivered to the Oklahoma Legislature by Feb. 3, 2017.

More from TPS

Gist pointed to examples of schools that have demonstrated progress not reflected in this year’s grades produced by the state’s accountability system.

“We’re tracking our performance very carefully, and we take accountability very seriously in the Tulsa Public Schools,” Gist said. “So we have many ways that we’re looking at performance in the district, and we are incredibly proud of the hard work that our principals and teachers are doing all across the city to help students achieve.”

Gist highlighted Hamilton Elementary School, saying it saw proficiency rates in math and reading increase by an average of 12 percentage points on the state assessment but received a grade level of F from the state accountability system.

“It was a little disheartening,” Hamilton Principal Tera Carr said about seeing her school’s grade this year. “We see the growth in our students and in our community, but sometimes it can also feel like, man, other people out there are rating us, and they’re just not seeing what we’re actually doing.”

Carr expressed concern about the impact the school’s F grade has on her students.

“I don’t want them to feel like the letter that’s being placed on them has to dictate who they are,” Carr said.

East Central High School students graduated at a rate 10 percent higher than the year before, while the school’s grade on the state report card improved from a D- to a D.

At Anderson Elementary School, which the state assigned a letter grade of F, 70 percent of third-graders experience one or more year of growth in reading on the Measures of Academic Progress, or MAP, assessment, according to TPS.

“Honestly, it’s hurtful, and a little bit painful, but we keep it in perspective,” Anderson Principal Tracy Thompson said about the school report cards.

Anderson is made up of students living in a low socioeconomic status, and many of them don’t perform well on tests — like those the state’s school accountability system relies upon — that measure a lot of background knowledge, Thompson said.

“We welcome all of the accountability. ... But we just want it to be fair,” Thompson said.

Thompson said teachers and school officials are constantly tracking data measuring student performance and using it to improve their teaching, and she told anecdotes of parents and state officials who have been shocked by the school’s F grade after seeing the progress its students are making.

“That’s a great feeling, that even the community realizes it’s a flawed system,” Thompson said.

But still, for teachers at Anderson, Thompson said the school report card is like a “once-a-year slap in the face.”

“I tell my teachers: You’re the best, and we’ll wear any scarlet letter they want us to, but we’re doing the day-to-day work for children and with children, and that’s what matters,” Thompson said.

Suburbs’ performance

In the area’s six biggest suburban districts, schools received mostly A’s and B’s and saw a fair amount of fluctuation from 2015 grades.

Broken Arrow Public Schools had no scores below a C- last year, but three schools dropped to a D in the district. Highland Park Elementary improved from a B+ to an A- while the freshman academy and high school slipped to a B+ and C- respectively. The high school’s decline is significant, as its index score of 85 last year dropped to 71 this year.

Superintendents Jarod Mendenhall of Broken Arrow Public Schools and Stacey Butterfield of Jenks Public Schools joined Gist in calling the state’s accountability system flawed and said the districts place little credibility on the grades as accurate measurements of performance.

Jenks Public Schools did not receive any grades below a C+, but none of the sites in the district saw improvements in their letter grades. Among its seven schools, only one received an A, compared to three last year. The high school dropped from an A- to a B-.

According to a statement from Jenks, an error in reporting resulted in the district’s middle school receiving a C instead of a B, and the system did not allow for a correction to be made.

“Rather than taking into account the success of our students and teachers, the current system puts forth misleading information,” Butterfield said in a written statement. “At every one of our school sites, we combine rigorous curriculum with extensive opportunities for student advancement and success. We look forward to a new, improved assessment system which will tell the full story of school achievement.”

Union High School also saw a big drop, from an A (93) to a B- (82). The district received two F’s and five D’s, as it did last year. Cedar Ridge Elementary School made a leap from a B to an A-.

In Sand Springs, three of eight schools saw improvements, including Angus Valley Elementary School, which went from a B to an A+, and Central 9th Grade Center, which went from a B+ to an A.

Bixby’s seven schools had all A’s and B’s but saw declines in grades at the high school, which went from an A to a B+, and the middle school, which went from an A to an A-.

In Owasso, grades for Barnes Elementary School and Stone Canyon Elementary improved from B+ to A-. The district this year scored all A’s and B’s, and the one school that received a C+ grade last year — Mills Elementary School — improved to a B-.

More from the meeting

When one state board member, Bob Ross of Oklahoma City, at Thursday’s meeting repeatedly asked what state education officials would do to address school sites with chronically poor marks from the state, Hofmeister and other board members challenged him to consider and advocate for solutions to the underlying issues of funding and a statewide teacher shortage.

“Number one, we have to stop the real problem, which is the teacher shortage — when you don’t have a teacher in a classroom or you have 50,000 students with an emergency certified teacher,” she told Ross. “We can take our resources and instead of dispersing that across a wide array of schools labeled an ‘F,’ we can take those resources and target the bottom 5 percent.”

Ross responded, “That all sounds great, but it’s been five years and we still have some of the same schools (with F grades).”

The board’s attorney Brad Clark interjected that new federal education law allows local school districts to implement their own improvement plans before states can intervene.

Hofmeister commented: “It’s fundamental in a state with conservative values to have a system that respects local control. That’s why you see, both in assessment and in school support, we are doing more work to educate and build that capacity (in local school districts) to do the heavy lifting because we can’t be everywhere.”

Board member Bill Price, also of Oklahoma City, suggested adding an F-minus category to further downgrade the lowest-performing schools in the state’s ranking system.

Board member Cathryn Franks challenged Ross’ use of the term “excuses” in discussing common challenges to get English learners testing at a proficient level, for example.

“They’re not excuses. They’re reasons,” said Franks, from the southwestern Oklahoma town of Roosevelt. “We have to value our teachers, and we are not doing that as a state.”

For those outside the Tulsa area, 2016 data is posted on the state’s website at afreportcards.ok.gov. Follow tulsaworld.com as we provide updates throughout the afternoon, including report cards for every TPS, Broken Arrow, Jenks, Owasso, Union, Sapulpa and Sand Springs school site, plus a host of other districts in northeastern Oklahoma.