Schools hurt by change in standards
Say you play a basketball game and arrive at a final score.
Then, let’s say you raise the basket by a foot, go back to the videotape and then decide: Nope, that shot that went in when the basket was 10 feet high would miss if it were shot now. So would that one. And that one.
Obviously, the final score would change — and not for the better.
That’s the analogy Guilford County Schools officials are using to describe a change in state standards that determine how well schools are complying with the federal No Child Left Behind Act.
For 2007-08, the state changed the percentage of questions students must answer correctly on their algebra proficiency tests. The percentage of students who meet that goal, in turn, helps determine whether an individual school is complying with federal standards.
Current 10th-graders who took and passed the Algebra I test two years ago as eighth-graders aren’t individually affected by the change.
But now, their scores from two years ago must meet the new, higher standard for the high school to meet federal targets.
“The state has never given us the opportunity to ask students to retake the test,” Gongshu Zhang, the system’s chief officer for accountability and research, said Thursday. “If they did, most would still be proficient” even under the new standard.
A call to the N.C. Department of Public Instruction on Thursday was not returned.
Zhang is particularly concerned that a significant portion of the students whose scores were adequate two years ago but aren’t now are African American or are receiving free or reduced-price lunches, an indicator of poverty.
In 2006-07, of the 13 high schools with a large enough African American population to be considered a subgroup, the subgroups at 11 of those schools met federal standards.
But in 2007-08, with the new standard applied to the old scores, no African American subgroup met the standard at any school.
To meet standards, a school as a whole must meet its targets, but so must each individual subgroup at that school. If even one subgroup comes up short, the school misses the target.
School officials said that in earlier discussions with state officials, they talked about two possible ways to address the problem.
One was to count the old scores under the new standard, but lower the percentage of students at a high school who would have had to pass the test for the school to meet its federal target.
Zhang said that adjustment, offered by the state, focused on entire schools and didn’t adequately take subgroups into account.
The alternative offered by the school system was to leave the school proficiency targets where they are as long as the old student scores can be counted under the standard in effect two years ago when those tests were taken.
The problem, Zhang said, is that it’s not clear whether either of those changes would be OK with the U.S. Department of Education.
If necessary, Zhang said, school officials want the state to facilitate discussions between the school system and the government.
“We want (any change) to be accurate, be fair, be appropriate,” he said.
Contact Lex Alexander at 373-7088 or lex.alexander@news-record.com
