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LCPS Evaluation By Testing Part 1: SOLs/AYP/NCLB
This morning marks the Superintendent's annual "State of Education" speech before the Chamber of Commerce. It might be interesting to your kids this week to know that while they receive their grades from school at the end of the year, schools get their grades at the beginning of each school year, based on results that pour in throughout the summer.
For the rest of this week I'll take a look a different yardstick each day and how LCPS measures against it. As I have said many times in the past and you can read about in a million places on the web, the emphasis on testing and metrics has led to a lot of problems in modern public education (teaching to the test, reduction in critical thinking skills, test stress on young kids). Nevertheless there are some benefits to these many tests and other metrics.
Primarily, there needs to be something relatively objective by which to tell whether the folks we hire to educate our kids are doing the job well. Metrics also enable comparisons between districts, which you'll see most starkly on Friday when I look at graduation rates. Particularly with the implementation of No Child Left Behind, metrics can differentiate between how well a schools serves different types of students and identify points of weakness within an otherwise strong system, so that a strong system can't neglect a few kids by letting those at the top pull the average up. And while I wouldn't make any final judgements based on any one metric in any one year, the collection of them over time does help to paint a picture.
Today I'll start with the big prize: results of the testing mandated by No Child Left Behind (NCLB) legislation. You can get the raw data from the Virginia Department of Education's Virginia School Report Card website. Their file is Excel, 1MB. I have isolated the Loudoun data for your convenience (XLS 200k, PDF 22K).
Get the highlights from the newspapers, Leesburg Today has a story on it, and the Washington Post did a brief rundown as well. Read the LCPS take here.
There is a tremendous amount of technical definition behind this information, and it's not safe to interpret the data without it. It's tempting for me to write about the details, but that would take a long time and there are plenty of other places to read about it. Here's a place to start: Adequate Yearly Process (AYP). When looking at AYP, you can only compare schools and districts within a given state, because each state sets different standards. Virginia's standards are particularly tough:
- Within Virginia, only 41% of school districts made AYP this year, Loudoun was one of them.
- Across the state, 26% of individual schools did not make AYP, within Loudoun it was 4.3% (3 of 70). All three from LCPS were middle schools, a level at which Loudoun seems to have the biggest challenge meeting AYP.
The School Board will receive a full report with more detailed data later this month, look for it on an upcoming agenda. The Curriculum & Instruction committee will no doubt dedicate a meeting to an even more detailed review and consulation with principals as it has in years past.
As I said in the beginning, this is just one indication of school performance and should be viewed with care and together with many other factors, the most important of which is the satisfaction of concerned and involved parents. If you have questions or concerns about your child's school, you should speak to the principal. Of course I and the rest of the School Board are always available to answer your questions as best we can as well.
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