Board seats come with helpful dossier

By Emily Richmond (contact)

Wednesday, Jan. 7, 2009 | 2 a.m.

Chris Garvey, Deanna Wright and Linda Young were sworn in Monday as the School Board’s newest members.

Minutes later, Young wanted to thank her supporters, but there was a delay as she figured out how to operate her microphone.

“First of all, you’ve got to learn how to use all the gadgets,” Young said, as the audience laughed appreciatively. “There’s a lot of little things you have to do.”

To be sure, the three new board members, who are responsible for a $2.1 billion operating budget and nearly 40,000 employees, must get up to speed quickly on a number of finer points.

Fortunately, there’s a crash course of sorts on the School District’s progress on student achievement, and the state of the school system as a whole — the district’s “Quality Assurance Framework.”

The past two years the district has produced the in-house report card, which is more comprehensive than the performance reports required by the federal No Child Left Behind Act.

In fact, it provides more information than most urban districts are willing to put in writing.

Performance is measured in a variety of areas. Targets are set for adequate, moderate or superior growth, and results are compared with the targets for three consecutive academic years.

Also included are broader achievement goals. For example, district officials wanted to reduce the percentage of second-year high school students who didn’t earn enough credits to advance to the next grade level. The most recent report, for 2007-08, shows that instead the share of credit-deficient students went up, to 31.1 percent from 25.7 percent in the prior academic year. For that goal, the district earned a “down” arrow.

There were sizable gains in other areas, however, including improved performance by special education students and English language learners, and a narrowing minority achievement gap.

Those improvements are the results of long-term efforts on the part of the district, individual schools and teachers, said Lauren Kohut-Rost, deputy superintendent of curriculum and instruction for the district.

“That’s why we have to look over a period of time at how we’re performing, rather than one year in isolation,” Kohut-Rost said. “The culture for change in school has to be developed and embraced. Then you see the results.”

Overall, 77 percent of the roughly 140 indicators showed the district had improved or held steady.

That, of course, means the school system declined in 23 percent of the achievement benchmarks.

In some cases, the drop was by a single percentage point, such as the decline in students who said they planned to continue their education beyond high school (73 percent, down from 74 percent last year). The first-time pass rate for students on the math section of the high school proficiency exam, a requirement for graduation, was 45.6 percent in 2007-08, down from 47.8 percent.

Despite the detail and transparency of the Quality Assurance Framework, it’s No Child Left Behind’s “adequate yearly progress” results, based largely on students’ standardized test scores, that grab the headlines each July and are more commonly used by the public to judge the performance of schools and the district. One reason is the simplicity of the ratings — adequate, high achieving or exemplary — like the movie critics’ thumbs up or down.

District officials say their in-house report card is still evolving, and that the goals and the benchmarks will continue to be refined.

But in its current form it’s a useful primer on the district’s achievements and shortcomings, something the newly sworn-in board members — who face fast-approaching legislative session that will likely bring steep budget cuts to the School District — could use to quickly understand the state of the school system they now govern.