Dumbing Down? Or Getting Smarter?

New Haven may take a year’s break from grading its schools as the system wrestles with new questions: How should it measure a school’s progress as it changes to new standardized tests? And should a school’s grade take into account how transient the students are or how many don’t speak English as a first language?

School officials weighed those questions — but made no decisions — in a discussion Monday at a regular school board meeting at Career High School.

Fred Benton, the school district’s data guru for school reform, prompted the conversation when he presented a set of proposed changes to the school system’s annual process of grading 47 schools based largely on student test scores. The annual school report cards are one facet of extra accountability that the school district created when it began a school reform effort in 2010. They are a key part of a ​“portfolio management” approach, by which schools are supposed to be managed differently according to how they perform. The system calls for giving extra autonomy to schools in the top Tier I, and extra interventions — and resources — to those that rank in Tier III.

The district has released these report cards for three years; it has not yet released them for the 2012 – 13 school year.

The effort has proved unpopular in part because staff and parents at Tier III schools report feeling demoralized and stigmatized — without getting extra supports to help them improve. Staff at Fair Haven School stormed the school board last year when their school was downgraded to Tier III, based in large part on standardized test scores. They called the ranking unfair because they have a challenging population with many transient kids and nonnative English speakers — and among the highest reviews in the district for parent and staff satisfaction.

Benton responded to that feedback Monday by proposing a number of changes to the way the district grades its K to 8 schools. (High schools weren’t discussed.)

“Challenge Index”

The most significant and hotly debated proposal concerned the way the district takes into account how challenging the student population is at each school. As part of the annual tiering, the school district has already been gathering data on four categories: transience (measured by how many kids transfer in after Oct. 1); poverty (the percent of kids eligible for free and reduced-price lunch); percent of nonnative English speakers; and the percent of kids with special needs.

(Click here for a spreadsheet breaking down those factors for all city K‑8 and high schools for the 2011-12 school year.)

Previously, that info wasn’t given much weight. It was used merely to assign a ​“peer group” to each school. It appeared on each school report card as a footnote, not as a major basis of the grade.

Benton proposed giving that info much more weight by creating a ​“challenge index” that would rank each school based on how challenging the student population is, using the same four criteria. Each school’s academic success would then be measured in relation to the students’ challenges.

Schools wouldn’t automatically get extra points for having transient kids. But their academic success would be measured compared to how other schools with similarly transient kids fared. If a school outperformed other schools with similar challenges, it could move up to Tier I — even if the test scores weren’t that high.

Board member Alex Johnston objected to this idea. He called it a ​“very fundamental change” in school accountability.

“The issue is, now we’re grading on a curve,” Johnston said. After they leave New Haven public schools, he argued, ​“our kids have to get over an absolute bar. If we create a curve inside this district, I worry” that kids won’t be prepared to succeed in college and career.

Benton said the district has always ​“graded on a curve.” The way it has measured student growth on test scores was curved: It measured how each student grew compared to other similar students. And even measurements of absolute performance on test scores were always relative to other New Haven schools, not to an outside norm.

He said educators and families have complained that the current grading system doesn’t take into account reality: That different schools face different challenges.

Of the four measures, schools vary most widely in the transience of the student body. Every year, about 1,000 kids switch schools, or join the district, after Oct. 1. Some have just arrived from Puerto Rico, Mexico, or Waterbury. Others have left magnet or charter schools due to poor behavior or a poor fit. They show up throughout the year, including just before test time, forcing educators to scramble to figure out their needs and help the class adjust to the change.

Those kids don’t get spread out equally over different schools. They hardly ever end up at magnet schools, because those schools accept kids mainly through an annual lottery. A small batch of neighborhood schools, meanwhile, bear the brunt of mid-year transfers.

So too, schools vary in the number of English-language learners they have. Newcomers to U.S. schools must begin taking state standardized tests in English after they’ve been in school for 12 months.

Benton proposed assigning each school a numerical value based on these factors. That ​“challenge index” would be the X‑axis of a graph. School performance would be judged on the Y‑axis. Schools that performed well, but had a high challenge, could make it into Tier I, and schools whose populations are wealthier, or less transient, would have to work harder to earn that top grade. As depicted on this graph (pictured), the bubbles colored in green represent Tier I schools; yellow would be Tier II; and those in red would be Tier III.

(After feedback from the public and school board on Monday, the school district renamed the ​“challenge index” to the ​“peer index,” Benton said.)

New Tests

Another major question facing the district: How should schools be graded, now that the district is ditching the main tool of measurement?

New Haven schools just decided to stop using the Connecticut Mastery Test —the state’s legacy standardized tests for grades 3 to 8 — and switch to a new ​“Smarter Balanced” test aligned with the Common Core national standards. Last school year was the final year schools used the CMTs, except for science.

CMT scores sank last year in New Haven as well as across the state. School officials attributed that decline to the fact that educators had stopped focusing on preparing kids for the CMTs, and started preparing them for the Common Core, which covers fewer topics in more depth.

For the past three years, the CMT has been the sole basis for grading city schools. School officials measured how much each student improved on the test relative to similar peers; and how well the school performed overall in terms of absolute scores.

Now New Haven is proposing not to use the CMTs to grade schools anymore, even for the 2012 – 13 school year, in which kids did take the CMTs. School officials can’t use the new Smarter Balanced test to show growth, because they need at least two years of data — and possibly three, depending on how the first experimental year goes. (The computerized tests are supposed to be ​“adaptive,” meaning they’ll get harder or easier depending on each test-taker’s answers; this year that feature will not be available.)

The school district has been looking around for other ways to measure how much progress schools are making. Officials are mulling over a range of other tests — such as the Degrees of Reading Power test for literacy — to use instead.

Benton offered one idea Monday: Grade K‑8 schools based on how their graduates perform in high school.

Board member Che Dawson gave a skeptical reply: An ​“A” isn’t the same in every high school, he said.

Benton also proposed giving more weight to school surveys in the school report cards. That would give an advantage to schools like Fair Haven — where staff and parents rave about the school, but the school is still deemed ​“failing” because of test scores.

Johnston urged the board to keep an emphasis on academic performance.

The discussion raised the question: Why grade schools at all?

Schools Superintendent Garth Harries, who designed the school tiering when he was a deputy schools chief, said the system aims to hold schools accountable for educating every kid. It aims to create a sense of ​“urgency” and a high aspiration for all kids.

He also recognized a need to also grade ​“team performance of educators,” which may mean the district should take into account the conditions in which they do their work.

Teachers union President Dave Cicarella (pictured), meanwhile, called for the practice to end altogether.

He said the district has heard ​“loud and clear from the teachers — we do not support it.” Staff are ​“demoralized” when the school system labels their school as Tier III, which equates to ​“bad,” he said.

“If you’re in a Tier III school, how could you possibly feel good about that?”

Johnston argued that the school district should take into account all constituencies — not just teachers — in weighing how to grade schools. The tool can be valuable for parents figuring out where to send their kids, he pointed out.

Parent activist Florence Caldwell joined Cicarella’s opposition to the system.

Tiering ​“intended to serve a good purpose,” she said, but it’s demoralizing. When a school is graded in Tier III, she said, students think, ​“oh we’re a bunch of dummies”; parents think staff aren’t serving their kids well; and staff feel bad about themselves.

Harries acknowledged that point. The system was designed as a management tool, so that schools in each tier would be managed differently. That has been key to choosing one to two failing schools per year to overhaul as ​“turnarounds.” But the school district has failed to come through with much support for the schools that are graded Tier III but do not become turnarounds, he acknowledged. So schools have ended up feeling blamed and not helped.

Hiatus?

Harries and Benton also raised the question: Should the district take a year’s respite from tiering?

The logic: The whole process of grading schools has been occurring too late in the year. The first year, it happened in November. Last year, it didn’t happen until January. That’s way too late to give schools feedback on their past academic year. Harries said the school district intends to start grading schools in the summer, so they can make better use of the feedback. The district had intended to tier schools last summer, but the project got postponed, he said.

Johnston suggested that the school district skip tiering this year, given that it still has not figured out the system by which schools will be graded. It wouldn’t make sense to grade schools in January, and then again in the summer, he said.

Harries replied that the tiering has one main consequence: Deciding which school or schools get overhauled as ​“turnaround” schools. In those schools, all teachers have to reapply for their jobs, a process that is supposed to start in March. The school district has been talking about launching a turnaround at Lincoln-Bassett School, though no final plans have been made.

If the school board decides to skip a year of tiering, it could still select a turnaround school without going through the whole process of grading all the schools, he said.

Harries said it ​“makes some sense” to skip the annual school grading this year, but no decisions have been made.