Maryland’s annual school ratings will be released Thursday morning, giving families a sense of how schools are doing based on standardized test scores, staff and student surveys, attendance and the breadth of class offerings.
Those ratings, also known as the Maryland School Report Card, are among the most nuanced parents will find — many school-rating sites are influenced heavily by test scores.
But state education leaders say the Report Card has one enduring issue.
School ratings are not much more than a proxy for family income, said Josh Michael, president of the Maryland State Board of Education. Schools with students from higher-income families have high ratings, and schools with a majority of low-income families have lower ratings.
In other words, if the state rated schools from one to five stars based on students’ family incomes, schools would get nearly the same ratings as they do with all the factors the Report Card ratings incorporate today.
In the next year, the state will rewrite its rating system to give more weight to how well schools help struggling students catch up and to student performance on the state test, as measured by pass rates. If the new rating system is successful, schools will be rewarded for their efforts to bring low-income students up to grade level, even if they don’t have a high pass rate on the test.
A committee of county superintendents, teachers, administrators and state school board members is examining whether the measures used to evaluate schools “are under the control of the school and not overly the result of socioeconomic factors,” said Scott Marion, a former executive director for the Center for Assessment who is advising the committee.
In deciding what factors to change, Marion said the committee is looking at questions like “Will the results actually be useful to schools?” Maryland School Superintendent Carey Wright has said she wants a system of reporting results to the public that is more transparent.
Right now, the Report Card scores schools on factors like academic achievement — how well students do on the state math and English language arts tests — as well as academic progress, which measures test score improvement from year to year. Schools also earn points based on how quickly students learn English, how many attend school regularly and whether they’re offered a well-rounded curriculum. Some factors are worth more points than others.
The committee has already ditched some measures and is mulling the rest.
The U.S. Department of Education, which requires annual ratings of schools across the nation, told Maryland last year to drop its use of a well-rounded curriculum as a factor in the rating system because nearly all schools are meeting the goal, making the measure meaningless, said Michael, the state board president, who is also executive director of the Sherman Family Foundation, a financial supporter of The Banner.
That factor has been heavily weighted. Schools get points for whether students learn social studies, art and music as well as the basics of math and reading. That factor was included in the ratings when they were launched eight years ago because educators were worried that schools focused too heavily on math and reading to the exclusion of other subjects that weren’t tested.
But recently, the legislature required state education leaders to increase academic factors from 65% to 70% of the total points a school could earn in the star ratings.
“The broad changes we are making are trying to increase the percentage of the Report Card that is focused on academic measures,” Michael said. At the same time, state education leaders hope to put more emphasis on the academic growth of students at each school and give more credit to schools with large numbers of low-income students who are improving academically, even if they don’t pass the state test.
The committee is considering a measure that would track students scoring in the bottom third of their grade and whether their performance improves from one year to the next. That would be called the opportunity measure.
The points schools get for attendance and what percentage of students aren’t chronically absent — defined as missing 10% of school days in a year — are likely to stay in the Report Card, according to a report by education department staff to the state school board.
The committee is also trying to come up with a way to measure the quality of staff in a school, including how often teachers are absent on school days.
The state school board expects to vote on the changes this winter and spring and put them in place by next fall, when the next star ratings are released.
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