School Wise Press SARC Services

SARC BITE 30 | DECEMBER 21, 2005

Dense SARCS May Leave Your Public Puzzled and Perturbed

You may find it frustrating to create your schools' SARCs. There is so much to compile, so many new facts to report, so many data revisions to include But however exasperated you may be, the parents on the receiving end of these reports may, at best, be puzzled and perturbed. At worst, they may suspect that you are hiding something, deliberately misleading them by burying meaningful measures in a deluge of detail.

How do I know? I've just returned from two conferences with directors of Parent Information Resource Centers, or PIRCs, as they are known on the circuit. I was invited to present by the U.S. Department of Education, the sponsor of the conferences. I listened to experienced, school-smart parent leaders tell me of their travails attempting to make sense of basic vital signs about a school's health, using school accountability reports. Three of these parent leaders were from California, and the other 42 represented most of the states in the union. (There are more than 70 PIRCs across the county.) Of the bunch, only the PIRC leader from Colorado was satisfied with the clarity and usability of her state's reports. The rest expressed dismay, disappointment, and anger at the obtuse and obscure ways that their state leadership reports results.

These parent leaders have simple and direct questions they want to be able to answer by reading their schools annual reports. Can your parents answer these questions from the SARCs you publish?

What is our high school's real graduation rate?
Are students who stay enrolled in our school for more than three years improving in math?
What qualifications does the principal have, and how long has she been an educator and a principal?
If some teachers aren't "highly qualified," how qualified are they? And should I worry about it?
What is the crime rate in our school, and how does that compare to other schools in the state?

WHY YOU SHOULD WORRY IF YOUR PARENT LEADERS DON'T UNDERSTAND YOUR SARCS

If parent leaders can't answer these questions, you should be concerned. Here's why it matters: beyond the obvious dependence your district has on its public to enroll students and keep them enrolled, you depend on your public to pass bond measures and parcel taxes. Given the depth of our state's fiscal crisis, if you haven't already gone to your voters with cup in hand, you will soon.

And if you think your students are captive customers, think again. A recent news story about a Bay Area school in Program Improvement bears the headline "Families Flee Schools Sinking Scores -- 'Underperforming' Label Exacerbates Problem." Parents are discovering that NCLB holds a ticket to the exit door. If your newspapers bring news that your schools are on the NCLB watch list, you've already missed the chance to be the first one to explain the situation. This key opportunity to be the first to deliver the news gives you room to put the Program Improvement news in context If your reading and math scores look good (and they may look better if you sum basic + proficient + advanced), and if your school is in Program Improvement because you have missed one or two out of 36 "events" in the AYP game, you have a strong case to make for the school's health.

The reason these parents are your most important customers is that they inform others. They will carry your message to hundreds of other parents. The directors of parent resource centers whom I met are already informing parents of their rights to choose other schools or arrange for free tutoring, if their kid's school is in year two or three of Program Improvement. And these parent leaders are also answering many other questions from parents. If you don't help them, they'll get their facts about your schools from the many other sources available: daily newspapers, the National Center for Education Statistics, or whatever pops up on Google.

POOR-QUALITY SARCS CAN DISENGAGE PARENTS

If your public can't make sense of your SARCs, if they can't find your reports in district-to-home mailings, if Spanish-speaking parents can't find your reports in a language they can read and understand, you are going to see them disengage. Disengagement takes many forms. It happens slowly, often invisibly, until a moment of truth arrives. That moment could be the first day of school next year. Or it could be the next election that you ask voters to approve a parcel tax. When you see enrollments decline, or your parcel tax measure defeated, you'll never know with certainty what the causes were. But if you hire a demographer to analyze enrollment patterns in your area versus population trends, or if you hire a political campaign management firm to survey your voting public, you'll get clues as to what is driving disengagement. And I assure you, one of them will be parents' perceptions of your hard-to-find, hard-to-read annual reports.

RECOMMENDATIONS

There are steps you can take now to get in front of this wave, and ride it. The first step, however, is listening with open ears.

Conduct a climate survey. Follow the lead of San Jose Unified and other districts that make an annual tradition of listening to parents, students and teachers. Read their survey.

Survey your parent leaders. Start with the opinion leaders: site council parents, parents on PTAs or PTOs, parents on your district advisory committee. Ask your board members to refer you to other parents whom you can bring to the table. Show them your schools annual accountability reports, and ask them for their impressions. Ask them to tell you what the CST test results mean. If you listen to their interpretations of your data tables, you may be surprised by what you hear.

Survey your teaching staff. Your district may conduct a climate survey every year or two. If so, include questions for your staff. Ask them if they have seen a school accountability report card recently. . Did they think it effectively reported their school's safety record, teacher qualifications, academic progress, instructional programs?

Count how many times your Web site visitors read your SARCs. You can have your tech team easily count how many readers have clicked on the pages containing SARCs. You should be able to get monthly counts at both the school and district levels. Monitor those counts, and take the results to your cabinet meetings. When San Jose USD started doing this, they learned that of all the informational categories on their robust Web site, readers most frequently requested the SARC pages. They found in the most recent 12-month period (November 2003 to October 2004), their site visitors had accessed 17,000 pages. Enrollment is about 33,000. Read the full story in SARC Bite No. 29.

Publish a short and sweet version of your SARC. More districts, even in these hard times, are choosing to invest in a parent-friendly summary SARC which supplements their full-length SARC. It can also come out sooner. Research from KSA-Plus Communications and Public Agenda supports this as the format that parents prefer. Here is a summary of this report's findings.

It is sure to improve the number of parents you reach, and increase their comprehension. It will also improve your compliance profile; NCLB calls for concise reports that are understandable, and calls on districts to disseminate them widely. Summary SARCs serve these purposes well.

RESOURCES

The U.S. Department of Education sponsors Parent Information Resource Centers all over the country. See the Web-based resources they share.

Families in Schools is one of Californias PIRCs, run by the esteemed Maria Casillas, who was previously executive director of the Annenberg-based, reform-minded Los Angeles Area Metropolitan Project (LAAMP).

See the lis of all California PIRCs.

San Antonio, Texas, has the benefit of a long-lived, deep-rooted PIRC. The host organization is the Intercultural Development Research Association.

This San Francisco Chronicle story of February 1, 2005, is about parents removing their kids from a Concord school in Program Improvement, is well worth reading and routing to colleagues.