Measuring School Performance

(Guest post by Eva Sorock)

The October issue of Chicago magazine currently on the racks features a bright red cover headline announcing “The Best Elementary Schools.” Parents (as well as school board alumni such as I - Wilmette District 39, 1995-2003) understandably flip immediately to the chart that lists the 115 best public elementary schools out of 1,700 in the Chicago area. I assume that produced 115 sets of happy parents, but what about the rest of us – Wilmette did not make the list!

Nothing for it but to read the article on page 90, further titled “The A+ Team.” Most elementary school parents I have known during the last 20 years are intensely invested in the experience their children have during the six or so hours per day their kids spend in the care of the public schools. Let’s hope they have learned to apply some kind of standards to studying education assessment statistics.

To start, the article reports that the schools data was “crunched” from the 2005 state report card; the magazine then “winnowed the data down to a small set of attributes most critical to the quality of education a school provides.” Here are the categories that went into creating the charts:

• Teacher/student ratios. According to the article, “the hope is that the fewer students a teacher oversees, the more individualized attention each student will get.” Unfortunately there never has been any proof of that mantra – in fact, as average class size has decreased in public schools over the last three decades, achievement has deteriorated geometrically. Actually it is the teachers who have benefited from teaching fewer students for the same or more pay. And capital expenditures have risen (paid by taxpayers) as the smaller class sizes have required continual additions to school space.

• Average teacher salary. “Schoolteachers ought to be paid well,” says the article. A nice idea, but where is the correlation between pay and achievement?

• Instructional expenditures per pupil. This is explained as an assessment of how much of the district’s resources go into teaching; it shows the “commitment of the community, via taxation, to high education standards.” Apparently this refers to the choice of spending scarce tax resources on buildings vs. teachers. Chicago then asks interestingly, “how closely does spending correlate with achievement?” Their own answer turns out to be an example of lower spending producing higher achievement (in Kildeer, Illinois.)

• Meets or Exceeds standards. Chicago is (guess what) not surprised that the magnet schools in Chicago (which have selective admissions standards) scored better than mixed population schools. Yet the article lumps all the schools together in its “data crunching.”

Most of the rest of the article lapses into an even more confusing array of anecdotes that promote what the education establishment really wants – the “whole-child centered” classroom. For example, it is a classroom that teaches a child that it is “OK to get a wrong answer.” Or maybe it is a classroom where children are “tricked” into learning geography when they think they’re “just talking football.”

Do we sense a pattern here? Between the lines is an outline for a fuzzy curriculum that is a mile wide and an inch deep taught by highly paid teachers who have less and less work as each union contract is approved. Chicago magazine might serve the parent community better by taking a look at a more current finding about public education. On September 12^th the Wall Street Journal reported that the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (representing 100,000 educators) urges that schools focus on teaching the basics, fundamentals such as multiplication tables and long division. Their latest guidelines are closer to what is taught in the truly high-achieving Singapore schools, where children learn a few math topics intensively before moving on to more difficult word problems. The new NCTM standards come in response to college professors who report spending more and more time teaching remedial math to college freshmen.

A final comment on the Chicago magazine article: parents who are interested in the magazine’s assessment of private schools might note that the article eschewed “crunching” random data for the private schools and came to its conclusions based on interviews with education experts at the schools themselves. Enough said on the value of that chart!

Anne adds:
(Also Tribune editorial yesterday with this):

Making sure that children understand the basics makes sense, and so does having clear standards and objectives by which to measure. (What doesn't make sense is what the Illinois State Board of Election has done: respond to poor pupil performance by lowering standards for 8th-grade math.)

And this:

Though Chicago Public Schools officials knew there were problems, they had done little to spotlight teacher absences until now.

For the first time this year, the district is publishing each school's average teacher absence rate in directories handed out to parents. Officials say the information will help parents gauge the quality of their schools, while spurring schools to better manage absences.

This is an issue in suburban schools too, coupled with the use of substitute teachers.

Related posts: Gender Gap in Suburban Schools, Fuzzy Math Fizzles, A Little Light