School Wise Press SARC Services

SARC BITE 7

The Spirit and the Letter of Accountability Reporting in "No Child Left Behind"

Laced into the 1280 pages of the new federal law on K-12 education are directives on accountability reporting. This mandate is not an entirely new one. The prior version of this law, known as Title I, indeed spelled out accountability reporting requirements in three sections of the code. But this time, the requirements hold a higher place in the general schema.

To help you make sure that your district's SARCs are in line with the new federal law, here's the first of a series of practical recommendations.

1. SARCs matter more. No longer are accountability reports just one in a long series of unenforced federal mandates. The new law considers the public's right to know the facts about schools a fundamental right. Even more, the language of the law asserts that parents will help drive improvements in the way schools work. The intent of Congress is to make SARCs a highly regulated conveyor of school facts to parents. The new Department of Education is expected to enforce these mandates with gusto.

2. SARCs must now cover schools, districts and the state. It's not just schools that must report results. It's now federal lalw that districts must publish these disclosure reports as well, as well as the state Department of Education. The good news is that the CDE has decided to publish district-level SARCs, taking the load off your shoulders. The not-so-good news is that you'll have no say in what they contain, how they look, or how they interpret the performance of your district.

3. SARCs have to be understandable. The era of the data dump is over. To satisfy the new federal law, you'll have to interpret and explain the meaning of the data to your public. This is no small challenge. Most districts' SARCs omit entirely any explanations of test results. On reviewing more than 400 districts' SARCs, I must say that when they get to test data, most read like an almanac — table after table of granular data. Federal law says this won't pass muster.

Recommendation: Include in your district's SARC team a person who can write without using education jargon, and who truly understands the meaning of test results. If your public information person isn't on your team yet, bring her on board pronto.

4. SARCs must measure "adequate yearly progress." While we have our API, which puts us far ahead of most other states, we are not yet measuring progress the way the federal law requires. It's no simple feat. In fact, based on applying the NCLB measure of "adequate yearly progress" to the spring 2001 test cycle, about one of every eight schools was tarred with the brush of having failed to make "adequate yearly progress."

Recommendation: If your schools had the bad fortune to make this list of "Program Improvement" schools, there are explanations you can offer that put the designation in context. The same is true of II/USP. God (and the devil) are in the details.

5. SARCs must be distributed to parents, staff, and the public. While the legal langugae here is somewhat vague, the spirit of the law is quite specific. You must put your SARCs in the hands of those they are intended for. Passive publication is out. Making SARCs available on demand is out.

Recommendation: Print your SARCs in summary form, and distribute them to parents in low-cost ways. Include them in the mailing of your parent handbook at the start of the year. Include them in the mailing of student report cards or at the end of the year when you mail out standardized test results. If your principals each mail a newsletter to parents, piggyback their SARC inside that mailing. The staff should get copies through interoffice mail. Your public can be reached by your sending a set of all schools' SARCs to each of your public library branches.

When you post your SARCs online, measure the "unique site visitors" who access your SARCs. This is rather simple for your web administrators to do. They can either subscribe to a web metrics reporting service, or they can place a shareware "counter" on each web page that measures usage.

You can expect that we'll continue to cover the accountability reporting aspects of "No Child Left Behind" in the months ahead. And if you have questions or comments, please send them via email to: stever@schoolwisepress.com.

(If you want help making budget conscious investments in your SARC program, give us a call at (800) 247-8443. Or contact us via e-mail at raghur@schoolwisepress.com.)