In its final meeting Wednesday evening, the State Board of Education (SBOE) Report Card Workgroup recommended eliminating the school district report card “A through F” rating scale and replacing it with an online dashboard compliant with the federal Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA). The recommendation will be heard before the SBOE Accountability and Continuous Improvement Committee at a Nov. 15 meeting.

After years of meetings, the workgroup made its recommendation following chagrin from teachers, districts and parents who felt the A-F system was unfairly scaled and punitive.

The preliminary recommendation to be considered by the SBOE committee reads: “The [Report Card Workgroup] recommends eliminating all A-F letter grades for the entire report card; and adopting an ESSA-compliant dashboard while still maintaining high expectations and aspirational goals.”

Chris Woolard, senior executive director for accountability and continuous improvement at the Ohio Department of Education (ODE), told Hannah News the exact language is still being worked on and will be fully updated based on the discussions of Wednesday’s meeting.

Woolard presented the workgroup with dashboards used in Oregon and California to show examples of ESSA-compliant dashboards to mixed responses. California’s dashboard used a color-coded rating system in lieu of an A-F system, while Oregon’s dashboard presented a greater array of raw data.

Workgroup member Scott Emery noted that many of the metrics presented on the other states’ dashboards are already available on the Ohio district report cards, and he called the current Ohio system a great accomplishment by ODE, lauding its presently intuitive graphical representation of data and ease of navigation.

Second grade teacher Donna O’Connor lauded California’s system for emphasizing a “value added” component, which was a major subject of the workgroup’s previous meeting (see The Hannah Report, 10/11/18) because it made the dashboard less “demoralizing” for low-achieving districts that scored well in a value-added component. SBOE member Pat Bruns said she liked the color-coded aspect of California’s dashboard.

Woolard emphasized that in order for a dashboard to be ESSA-compliant, there has to be a system to “meaningfully differentiate” districts from one another, which often takes the form of a “summative label,” such as an A-F grade, or a color, in California’s case.

Ohio previously used “descriptive labels” to rate districts, Chairwoman Nancy Hollister said. When members suggested a return to those labels, Hollister added that Ohio received criticism for its “meets expectations,” “exceeds expectations” and “does not meet expectations” designations because they did not provide enough data so the state moved to the A-F rating system.

In a lengthy exchange between Woolard and Rep. Mike Duffey (R-Worthington), the representative argued that presenting the raw data would be enough to “meaningfully differentiate” two districts, noting that a district that meets a 92 percent graduation rate clearly has a higher graduation rate than a school with a 64 percent graduation rate, but Woolard said there has to be a “system” to provide meaningful differentiation. Duffey countered that a zero-to-100 scale constitutes such a system, and Woolard said it does not.

Subsequently, members noted that Oregon’s dashboard highlights various amenities provided by schools on its district report cards. Bruns said if Ohio had a system like that, school districts wouldn’t have to create “trifold brochures” advertising their programs to push back against low report card ratings. Duffey said such a system would work for quantitative programs that would easily fit a taxonomy, like Advanced Placement (AP) classes offered at a given school, but it would not work for qualitative programs, using Worthington’s taiko drumming program as an example.

Duffey proceeded to offer several recommendations he said could remedy issues with the current report card, including shifting the calculation of the overall district score to include more weight from the value-added component, because he said that component is the one over which schools have the most control. He argued the achievement component, which measures students’ performances on state tests, is highly correlated with poverty and racial demographics; therefore schools have less control of that.

On the subject of the value-added index, Duffey said it should be measured against a five-year index that is recalculated every five years, rather than the current one-year index that is recalculated every year. He said looking at value-added over a longer timespan would allow for schools to truly measure progress, rather than “where they are in the pack.”

He also said that the way the value-added index is currently calculated is deeply flawed because it factors in a “confidence” measure, wherein measurements of larger sample sizes (larger student bodies) are typically more “confident” to be accurate. According to Duffey, the actual student growth metric is currently multiplied by the confidence in that measurement’s accuracy, which he said makes no sense.

In response to Duffey’s comments, Emery said he would want to at least see the one-year value-added index, though he agreed with Duffey’s comments on factoring confidence into the index. Workgroup member Jan Osborn said that because 75 percent of Ohio adults attended Ohio schools, it would be important to measure gains against five-year averages.

Duffey later reiterated his point about the achievement index being correlated with poverty and race, saying that, “In my opinion, if you have a summative system that correlates with poverty and racial demographics, it's flawed. … I’m not against measuring indicators; it’s more about summative scoring than A-F. The governor’s office wants A-F, and I think we could include that if we based it on progress because that’s the indicator that’s least correlated to poverty and race.”

He faced pushback from State Superintendent Paolo DeMaria, who said, “I’ve tried to be vocal on the issue of correlation because I don’t want us as an education system to concede that correlation will always exist. I think there’s evidence that high poverty districts and districts with certain racial demographics and high levels of English learners can learn on the same levels as affluent districts. That correlation almost projects the sense there’s a causality there, and that makes districts think there’s no reason to really perform and continue pushing. … We want to test these decisions against an equity lens.”

Duffey countered that “benchmarking is very fair,” and he noted that “everyone has their competitor districts.” He said he thought Columbus City Schools, for example, is not an “F” district, but because residents with economic mobility move to better-rated districts, that score becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.