How Your School May be Punished As a Result of Accountability:

Will the word "accountability" be misused just like some think the word "efficiency" was misused and twisted for political purposes and be used against rural schoolchildren and schools?

Recently The Omaha Public Schools had published a story in regard to their progress in achievement test scores. Concurrently the Nebraska Department of Education has proposed new standards, assessment,accountability and related topics.

The so-called accountability standards seem to propose to allow Omaha, Lincoln, and other huge and influential educational entities report all their students, schools and scores by 'district only'. Small 'one-building or 'one-school' districts appear to have only the option to report individually by school.

As has been reported earlier, OPS has some 80 schools, and LPS dozens more. All told there seem to be more than 130 public schools in Omaha and Lincoln comprising over 26% of the pupils in the state that will not report scores, only a district midpoint average. Other smaller schools will be forced to report actual scores.

Why be concerned? What effect may this have on smaller and/or rural schools and their pupils? Even some mid-sized schools may be at risk in this. Don't small schools always do well anyway? Why worry?

As has been seen in recent years, Nebraska policy makers seem to have been encouraged to 'sanction' or punish certain schools they don't like, usually based upon data quietly collected by the Nebraska Department of Education. A great deal depends on what is reported and how it shows up. The big districts with powerful finance departments and many, many state senators seem well aware that if they can conceal data that could be used to criticize them, only other schools will be criticized.

Remember that recently in education finance, individual schools above a certain NDE reported cost per pupil found themselves fiscally penalized, while schools of similar enrollment in the metro areas, and with even higher per pupil costs, remained 'officially' unreported and thus unpenalized.

Schools were asked to self-report their mileage distance from the next high school, and shortly thereafter those in rural areas that were closer together than certain powerful policy makers liked, were penalized because of distances that didn't matter until reported to NDE. Metro schools, no matter how close together, were not penalized. Not one metro school took a hit on that, but dozens of rural schools did.

Why then not expect certain policy makers to attempt to utilize test results gathered by NDE to sanction, punish, or defund certain less politically powerful schools in the name of 'accountability'? Schools that they don't like?

If metro schools results and/or deficiencies are allowed to go unreported, only small and/or rural schools will be available for sanctioning.

Look at it this way; OPS reports that their average California Achievement Test (CAT) scores at the elementary level is the 67th percentile. What is officially unreported is that many of their elementary schools are much much lower than that; for example: OPS Sherman Elementary appears to be in only the 17th percentile, OPS Miller Park Elementary appears to be at the 38th percentile, and OPS Indian Hill Elementary at the 42nd percentile. Thousands of OPS elementary school pupils are achieving at far less than the OPS reported 67%.

If legislative policy makers (as may be expected) choose to sanction or take measures against schools below a certain percentile, OPS will only be reporting the 67. Not one of the OPS low performing schools would be sanctioned, regardless of how poor their performance, if the proposed NDE reporting scheme goes into effect. Their low scores would be hidden.

What if the policy makers choose to sanction the bottom 20% of low performing educational facilities on the statewide average? If reported by 'district' as is proposed, OPS will tend always be above that point, as they are so large that their average tends to bring the state average toward OPS scores. Since OPS in effect largely establishes the state average, they will by definition, never be 'below the state average'. Only somebody else's school will be at risk.

And they only have to pick off a few smaller schools each year, kind of like they appear to be doing in school finance. Strangle, discredit, embarrass the smaller schools...while concealing OPS & LPS.

Certainly, rural schools generally do well in test scores. But if Omaha is never ever a target for sanctions, and Lincoln is never a target for sanctions, guess who will be the only targets for sanctions? How will class size data be used? Pupil/teacher ratios? If OPS only shows a district wide average, they will always look good, because their numbers always drive the statewide averages, and they've shown they have the political punch to be protected.

It doesn't have to be this way, but it all depends on how things are reported. If the multiple school OPS district reports only an 80 school average, perhaps the rest of the schools in the state should only report by a multiple-school "ESU" average. Omaha may want to look heroic with a self-reported (67) percentile rank on the CAT...but that is far far from the whole story about OPS.

How this is all reported appears to be critical to the survival of small and/or rural schools. Some mid-size schools, particularly those with large special populations, may be at even greater risk as they don't usually have scores as high as the smallest schools...and they don't have the gigantic averaging power of OPS and LPS. (Interestingly, it looks as if somebody may have rounded each and every OPS school score to the next highest whole number; yep, that's right, and it appears to have had quite a nice effect on their published scores. In fact, they even appear to have then rounded each of their school averages up to the next highest whole number to achieve their so-called 'district' average, which was then apparently again rounded up, never down.) If you don't have multiple schools, you don't have multiple chances to "round up".

Talk about blatant, crass, in-your-face, we-figure-you're-too-dumb-to-notice procedures...

Even if some are sincere about how the achievement test scores are to be used and not used, what keeps certain state senators from using the information in a twisted fashion? What about the big anti-rural newspaper?