Credibility of School Data Damaged: Houston Fakes Dropouts, Falsifies Campus Crime

ISSUE 60 | NOVEMBER 24, 2003

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The gory details came to this owl on page one of the November 7 New York Times. Seems that district higher-ups had reported over 3,000 campus crimes to the police department, but less than 800 to the state education agency.

In the article, the head of Houston's teacher union, Gayle Fallon, claimed this phony reporting of on-campus crimes was routine. "We'd be grateful if theyd just report what happens on campus," she said.

The evasion by principals of reporting student crimes and discipline problems reminded some education observers of the Enron scandal. "It is all phony; it's just like Enron," said Linda McNeil, a professor of education at Houston's Rice University, in a Washington Post article on the same crime-reporting scandal.

Pundits proclaimed these two data debacles damaged the reputation of U.S. Education Secretary Rodney Paige, whose claim to fame was the Houston miracle of rising test scores and a narrowing achievement gap between white and minority students. But this Owl believes that the damage is broader; that the credibility of public education data has fallen a few notches as a result

DELIBERATE AND INDELIBERATE FALSEHOODS

The bias of self-interest is as present in K-12 as elsewhere. Yet the enterprise of education requires truthful, factual, self-reported data. Attendance reporting is perhaps the most obvious, since dollars come to schools when students are at their desks. If dropout and crime reporting can be falsified, why not attendance data, teacher credentials, financials, you-name-it?

Misstating some facts has unfortunately become a K-12 tradition. Faulty or vague methods of reporting data are handed down from year to year and become so ingrained into the district culture that few people question their validity. Consider how school site expenditures are commonly reported in California. The average teacher salary is allocated to the site, based on teacher FTE counts and the district's average teacher salary. This method makes it seem like all teachers receive the same pay. It disguises the reality that schools filled with new teachers have lighter payrolls than schools filled with veterans. Although the Standardized Accounting Code System (SACS) makes it easy to determine actual site expenditures, most districts don't bother to do so.

The Education Code calls for school accountability report cards to disclose the actual site expenditures in the prior fiscal year. Yet the CDE allows districts to use the averaging method in the data guidelines to the school accountability report cards.

Dropout and graduation rate reporting are notoriously vague. But the process still requires staff to track down every missing student. This is not only imprecise, it tends to produce a lower dropout statistic.

For more information on skewed dropout rates, see this November 16 article from the San Diego Union Tribune.

Where are the auditors in all this? California has its Fiscal Crisis Management and Emergency Team (FCMAT). But this agency is limited in scope to selective assignments, and limited by staffing caps to auditing too few districts a year. Is the future going to lead more districts to staff their own internal auditing units, much like Los Angeles Unified, in order to police themselves? Is a recast CDE going to staff up the 17-person FCMAT unit so they have the capacity to meet the tasks at hand?

In the realm of data audits, identifying potential errors and miscounts is relatively easy. It is also relatively inexpensive. But someone has to care — not just your CBEDS liaison. The board and the superintendent have to care. That is the essential precondition for truth-telling.

RECOMMENDATIONS

So, how do you prevent an Enron of your own from happening? Here are the Owl's recommendations:

1. Set a tone of candor. Data transparency is a good first step. Your public should be able to see your operating statistics, your data on test results, everything except those employment matters where privacy laws prevail. Policy sets this tone.

2. Publish results professionally — online and in print — to ensure that your reports are clear and readable, and to let your public know that you take this seriously.

3. Explain and interpret results; do not just dump numbers into tables. Your public is concerned about budget cuts and confused about API and AYP results. Explain this data to them. Get in front of the wave of data releases, or risk drowning when you fall behind.

4. Distribute printed copies of your school and district accountability reports to parents and staff. Share your goals with your staff and your public and explain how you plan to achieve those goals.

REFERENCES

School Wise Presss Virtual Library on dropout and graduation rate debates. Competing methods of counting make this even more confusing.

States plans to report graduation rates are all over the map.

The New York Times story about Houston's crime reporting flaws (requires registration).

Houston's dropout reporting debacle almost cost them their Texas accountability rating.

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