‘Report card’ grade explained at EBOE

“We’re moving in the right direction but we’ll never be satisfied until we can get our achievement up, ideally to 100 percent,” Jason Stump told those attending the Enterprise Board of Education meeting Jan. 29. “That is what we strive for.”

Stump is the Enterprise City Schools Director of Secondary Instruction. At the first EBOE meeting of the new year, Stump, ECS Director of Elementary Instruction Dr. Teri Prim and Enterprise High School Principal Brent Harrison talked about the school system’s scores on the state report card which was released to the public Dec. 29, 2018.

The Academic Report Cards are the result of the Legislative School Performance Recognition Program Act, created by the state legislature, which legally requires a letter grade assessment to be assigned to each public school.

The state law passed in 2012, patterned after Florida’s school report cards, but was never implemented until two years ago in conjunction with federal law.

Forty-four states use a rating system to evaluate the schools’ performance and the A-F grading system is the most commonly used method.

The letter grade is a snapshot of how the school performed during previous years. The test scores and attendance information is gathered from the last academic year, the graduation rate and college and career readiness grade is from two years back.

This is the second year that the letter grades have been released. “The scores are all based on the previous year’s data,” said Enterprise City Schools Superintendent Greg Faught. “Growth is calculated from two years back. The letter grade is based on the percentage of points earned from each area based on last year’s data as determined by the state.”

Enterprise City Schools overall score was 86 percent last year and is 84 percent this year. The addition of a Progress in English Learner Proficiency category and scoring parameters account for much of the 2 percent drop, Stump explained.

The academic achievement category is the raw test score data. Academic growth is the measure of how the students improved over the course of the year. The graduation rate score received this year is actually based on the numbers from the 2016-2017 school year.

The state does not distinguish between the excused and unexcused absentees for a student. A total of 15 absences—excused or unexcused—constitute “chronic absenteeism. Dual enrollment counts towards college and career readiness as does enlistment and delayed entry into the military.

The Progress in English Learner Proficiency category was added to the the ECS report card this year based on the percentage of students learning English as a second language. Enterprise City Schools and the Daleville City Schools are the only school systems in the area that have a high enough percentage to warrant that classification for scoring.

“They changed the metric a bit. They changed some of the point values,” Stump said. “Had the metric been the same we would have had the same overall score.”

Stump noted that all the schools improved in academic achievement. “Which is key showing that our kids achieve at a high level and that is what we want to improve year to year,” he said.

The academic growth category is what EBOE member Dr. Danny Whitaker said he thought was the main category to focus on. “Everybody should look at academic growth and achievement,” he said. “Are the metrics for next year going to stay the same or are they going to be adjusted? It’s like they are changing the rules of the game every quarter.”

“It’s hard to have a really good plan for where you are going when you don’t actually know how you are going to be measured,” Stump replied. “That’s why testing is not always the ideal measure of the achievement of the kids—you can measure through testing or you can measure through how many kids we send to college and how successful they are when they get there.

“Our goal when they get out of school is that they are successful whether they go to college or go to trade schools or go to the military,” Stump added. “We have a lot of kids go into the military that are extremely successful taking the military route.”

“The point system used to obtain the scores just levels the playing field for school systems that don’t have as high of academic achievement,” Faught said. “The College and Career Ready category doesn’t take into consideration remediation rates when a kid gets to college.”

Stump agreed. “We may not have the highest overall report card in our neighboring school systems, but we, by far, have the highest achievement,” Stump said. “There are some systems that have 98-100 percent graduation but only have 50-60 percent achievement.

“You want your academic achievement score to be as high as possible and then your graduation rate should take care of itself,” Stump said. “If you have a lower achievement rate and a high graduation rate, a lot of those kids are going to college not really prepared and they are wasting money and time taking remedial college courses that don’t count towards their degree program.”

Stump said that he and Prim are meeting with each of the schools’ principals to determine a plan of action to decrease chronic absenteeism and increase the academic growth scores. “It’s a work in progress and we’re doing everything we can between now and next year to improve next years’ data.”

“I don’t want to ever send my child to a school system that is teaching to a test being scored,” EBOE member Reid Clark said. “I would like for us to test to show how well we are teaching.”

Faught reiterated what he said after last year’s scores were released. “I said it last year and I’ll say it again,” he said. “Take this with a grain of salt because you cannot boil down and measure what a school system does with a machine based test.

“The test should really be given to help teachers understand what they need to teach better,” Faught added. “There are many facets of a school that cannot be measured but still add recognizable value and quality to the overall school experience.

“One of the things that we believe in is that we want to do the very best we can but we’re not going to dedicate our days to (the report card score),” Faught said. “Our days are going to be dedicated to developing principled students prepared for life after graduation. That’s our vision.”

Additional data and details about the factors used to determine grades are available on the Alabama State Department of Education’s website www.alsde.edu.

The next meeting of the EBOE is Tuesday, Feb. 26, at 6 p.m. in the Central Office Building on Hutchinson Street. The meeting is open to the public.