This week, the Georgia Department of Education identified “priority” schools in Georgia. A “priority” school is one in which the students consistently perform poorly on tests, have low graduation rates, and are also receiving federal improvement funds. The designation of “priority school” is part of the new terminology in Georgia’s ESEA Flexibility Request, know commonly as the NCLB Waiver.  Other types of school designations include: alert schools, focus schools (schools contributing to the achievement gap) and reward schools (highest performing Title I schools).

Seventy-eight schools in Georgia were identified as “priority” schools. According to the ESEA Flexibility Request, these schools will receive support by creating short-term action plans monitored by a “lead school improvement specialist.”  Accountability for improvement based on the support these schools will receive will be based on “standards accountability.”  This means that the measure of improvement will be based on high-stakes tests, the same ones that have been used in the past few years.

In the Georgia ESEA Flexibility report the only criterion of measurement that will be used with kids who have traditionally not done well in school, will be “increasing academic achievement on state assessments and attaining proficiency in meeting state standards.”

There is absolutely “NO FLEXIBILITY” in the way we try and find out what and how students learn.  It all comes down to that high-stakes test at the end of the year.  So what do you think will determine the nature of instruction for these students.  It will be a focus on passing the test, and thus reinforcing the principle that in schools of high need, much of the instruction is “teaching to the test.”

 

Take a look at this graph.  It plots the percentage of students meeting the SAT Criterion (college readiness) and concentration of poverty (based on the percentage of students receiving free and reduced lunches) in Texas high schools, charter and public. There is a very strong relationship indicating that the greater the concentration of poverty in a school, the fewer number of students who reach college readiness, based the SAT criterion.

Figure 1. Percentage of high school graduates meeting Texas SAT/ACT College Readiness Criterion plotted as a function of concentration of poverty. Every disk is a high school, with the area of the disk proportional to the number of graduates. Colors indicate the percentage of minority students in school. Source: Dr. Michael Marder, Used with Permission. Follow this link to see more visualizations of education data.

As Dr. Michael Marder reports in his study of high school mathematics and college readiness, the association of poverty concentration with education performance is very strong. And according to Dr. Marder, research data shows that teacher quality is not the most important factor impacting student achievement. As he puts it:

If teacher quality really were the most important factor impacting student achievement, one would have to conclude that every Texas high school with more than 85% poverty concentration has retained a staff of largely inferior teachers for as long as data have been collected, while virtually every single Texas high school with less than 15% poverty concentration has managed to acquire superior teachers.

One of the strategies that is typically used with schools that have been labeled as “failures” is either fire the staff, or bring in an outside management group.

The problem with education policy today is that we think there is only one way to find out about student learning and progress.  Why do we think the only way to find out about student learning is an achievement test.   Achievement tests “measure” a very low level of academic performance, and these tests miss completely learning that is most likely more important such ability to do inquiry, solve problems, work independently, work cooperatively, know how to find information to inform, and so forth.

Until we begin to think different about the real issues that face Georgia’s “priority” schools, we will simply reinforce what has been.  And it doesn’t have to be.