And the report cards are here.
School districts and administrators across the state received their first “School Report Cards” as a part of Michigan’s Education YES! legislation on Oct. 21. The goal of the grade cards are to give parents a measuring stick for reviewing their public schools.
The official grades of each school have yet to be released to the public, but school officials were able to view the results online after the release date. The districts were then given until Nov. 5 to appeal any errors or inconsistencies they found with the results.
“They are running late with this, very late,” Curriculum Director Karen Eckert informed board members at the Oct. 27 regular meeting. “It could be another month or more before everything is completed.”
Oxford Schools officials have found four errors with the results for the district’s individual school buildings. First, Leonard Elementary’s report came back without any grades because the school had less than 30 students take the MEAP exams. However, the school was still listed as not having made Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP).
“How can you not make AYP when you don’t have any results?” questioned Eckert. Officials have already appealed this inconsistency, and the result has been changed.
Errors with the MEAP exams at two of Oxford’s elementaries have also been found. One set at Clear Lake and one set at Lakeville are being questioned by officials. Eckert expects the final results of these appeals to take some time.
District-wide, Eckert said that officials have found the MEAP scores of several “mobile” students included in their overall results. “Mobile” students are those that have been in the district for less than a year and are not to be included in the final scoring. “We’ve found about six those.”
Finally, Eckert said she ran across yet one more problem after going back to double-check the grade card on the web – Daniel Axford Elementary had gone from being listed as making AYP to not.
“I went back onto the website and it had been changed,” said Eckert. She added that Daniel Axford is a feeder school for Oxford Elementary and the two buildings should have identical scores and results, especially since the students at Daniel Axford are too young to take the MEAP.
Aside from just dealing with internal errors on the grade cards, Oxford Schools is also having to keep an eye on external errors in the system itself. So far eleven different problems have been reported with AYP status or Education YES! results statewide:
n Students who were given non-standard accomodations were not counted for participation – the result of miscommunication with programmers.
n Average Daily Attendance rates were reported much lower than actual rates.
n Students’ MEAP results showed no total ELA (English Language Arts exam) score even though they have both the reading and writing scores available.
n Whole screens would be blank on the website for the math participation rates for whole districts.
n Thousands of missing MEAP results.
n Schools receiving MEAP results for students who are not in that district.
n Mobile students were not removed from the summaries.
n Target AYP slopes were computed wrong – could have been a difficulty with school ID numbers).
n Missing MEAP data points – the school exists in the database and had MEAP results, but the cell for the Education YES! details is blank.
n MI Access was not included in the participation rates.
n Participation rates were sometimes listed over 100 percent.
“I’m pleased with what we got,” said Eckert to board members, “but this is such a convoluted system and I’m not going to say I like it.”
Administrators were told the grade cards could be released to the public at any point after the Nov. 5 deadline; however, schools have also been told that this will not happen until all appeals have been finalized and changes made.