School Wise Press SARC Services

SARC BITE 15 | AUGUST 25, 2003

How to Report the Baffling STAR Test Score Release to Your Public

Confusion reigned over the August 15 STAR testing release, which also featured the first glimpse of how well California schools are meeting Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP). Federal and state accountability measures clashed while citizens scratched their heads over proficiency bands and national percentile ranks. How is a citizen, not to mention an educator, supposed to make sense of this mess of conflicting signals? This installment of the SARC Bite offers some tips.

Accept Conflict. Life is messy and rife with conflict. Conflicting signals abound in other fields. In the mature field of financial reporting, for example, no one expects the three leading indexes (the Dow, the S&P 500, and the Russell 2000) to move in unison. They capture different movements of varied layers of the equity markets.

Likewise, AYP and the Academic Performance Index (API) measure different things, so the results will logically differ. Prepare explanations that make clear these differences. The AYP measures results against benchmarks: participation rates, proficiency, and API levels; the API measures progress. The AYP is federal; the API is California-specific. The AYP is fault intolerant (one ding and youre out); the API is fault tolerant (you can meet your API targets no matter where you are starting).

Don't disregard the disaggs, but don't get buried by them, either. Troubled by the onslaught of disaggregated data that is now required by No Child Left Behind? You are not alone. You now have a mountain of data to interpret and report.

When you report disaggregated results, you can do better than a data dump. Present all disaggs, of course, but explain the ones that matter most to your leadership. Focus on your district's strategic goals. Is the achievement gap a key issue? Then present and explain the API rendering of the gap across all curricular areas, and show how it has changed over time. Or, if your district is focused on boy/girl differences in science and math, identify those differences on the standards tests and show how they've changed in the past two years.

Read the newspapers. Reporters face the same challenges you do in making sense of school facts. Parents questions are often part of the news story. Think about what they find confusing and address those issues in your SARCs and other communication. Note that newspapers don't just present results. They explain, clarify, and interpret. If your treatment of test results is going to be effective, you'll need to do more than pour numbers into tables. Review coverage provided by leading newspapers of the August 15 test release.

Ask your principals to be your eyes and ears. Listen as parents pepper your principals with questions about proficiency levels and AYP. If you pay attention to the questions parents ask, you can answer many of them in your annual reports. Remember, your SARCs should help your principals explain results. You can make their jobs easier by anticipating parents questions.

Sit down with parents and listen. You have golden opportunities to meet with parents right now and in mid-October when the API scores are released. Use these opportunities wisely. You can attend PTA or PTO meetings; you can join site council sessions and bring your questions. If you have Title I schools that have not made their AYP targets two years in a row, your parents are likely to have questions about transfers and tutoring. Your SARCs should convey clearly which schools fall into this zone.

Speak with your superintendent and school board. Your leadership routinely meets with business and community organizations and hears their questions about testing and your schools progress. Now is the time to ask your superintendent to share with you the questions she's hearing. Those questions could be about how the austerity era is affecting your schools. Or it could be about safety concerns. If you don't ask, you are missing a learning opportunity.

If you raise your antennas and listen to the questions your public has about their schools, you will be better prepared to address them — in your SARC reports and elsewhere.

REFERENCE

For the inside line on what parents want to know about schools, the research by KSA-Plus Communications still prevails. It was published by EDUCATION WEEK in their annual report, "Quality Counts" some four years ago. You can still find it online, thanks to the good souls at EDUCATION WEEK.