The Owl Newsletter

ISSUE 33 | APRIL 17, 2001

SPRING IS OPEN HOUSE SEASON, AND SARC'S ARE CHIRPING

One of the Owl's spring pleasures is that moment when schools open their doors again, and invite parents to come, look, and listen. The Owl wants to know if this is also a moment you're prepared to take advantage of ... a moment when parents are attentive to many of the same concerns you have.

"How's the school doing?" is likely to be top-of-mind. You can be prepared to answer your parents in several ways, but one of them should be in writing. And the document best suited to answer this question is your school accountability report card (SARC).

Imagine your SARC's as an annual report. Any annual report worth publishing answers stakeholders' questions clearly.

How are we doing compared to others in our "market?"
How are we doing compared to our own performance in the prior year?

If you can't compare your schools' performances, one by one, to others, how can a reader make sense of the results? Comparison to your schools' own conditions in the prior year is equally important. Today, let's look not at test scores, but at the things we all must account for: money and time.

ACCOUNTING FOR MONEY

Can your SARC tell its readers how money is spent, for example? This is a plain, straightforward question that few are prepared to answer. The Owl has read SARC's from over 100 districts, and none accounted for a school's actual expenditures. All relied instead on district-wide factors: average teacher pay, principal pay, superintendent's pay, etc. What's so hard about calculating real expenses site by site? Even if the state's accounting system doesn't require this, why don't you just do it for the benefit of smart site management and your public?

Of course, it would show that schools get funded at different levels, based on how senior the teachers are, and who the students are (LEP, GATE). The deliberate inequality of funding-per-student is something your public should know, and with your help, can appreciate.

An interesting article on site specific budget shenanigans appeared in the April 4 issue of Education Week, in fact. Marguerite Roza from the University of Washington, wrote that salary-averaging disguises the real cost of teachers school by school. Among the losers: schools with Title I students and lots of young teachers.

They are burdened with high "average" salary costs, when their own teachers are younger and lower paid.

ACCOUNTING FOR TIME

The traditional SARC reports how many instructional minutes are in a school year, subject by subject, compared to the state's minimum. This is about as useful as Kodak's infamous internal corporate calendar, which had 13 identical months, each made up of 28 days. It was used frequently inside of Kodak, but proved useless outside the company.

If you give up the habit of ed-jargon, leave the silliness of "instructional minutes" aside, and instead show parents what portion of a school day is spent on core subjects, parents would "get it." A simple pie chart would be a useful way to show how much time is invested in reading/writing, math, science, and social studies.

To see one example of how this can be done, take a look at page two of a SARC from School Wise Press.

STRAIGHT FROM THE OWL'S MOUTH

It's easy to offer your public a clear description of how your schools are doing. It just requires a break from some very poor traditions that relegate parent communications to a low level staffer and the ditto machine. It requires trusting that your public can understand measures of learning. (If they can read stock market charts and baseball stats, they can certainly handle SAT-9 results when presented clearly.) And it requires that education leaders elevate the status of their annual reports to the high spot they deserve.

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