As a parent who also happens to be an educator, intimately familiar with the ins and outs of assessment, I want to take this opportunity to declare these report cards complete and utter bullshit (sorry for the language, but it's accurate).
There are two points I want to make here. The first is the assessment point. The second is about the politics of the system that leads to these report cards.
I am the director of a large, multi-section public speaking course that counts for general education credit at the university where I work. I am, therefore, responsible for conducting assessment on the course I direct. The most important thing that I've learned about assessment is that the data needs to meet the needs of the program being assessed. You need to be able to look at that data and take action based on what you see.
First, a digression. An example may help those who don't do assessment. You can skip this section if you don't care about my thoughts and experiences with course assessment. When I took over the course I direct, I considered the most recent assessment that had been done on that course. It's pretty standard that basic communication courses do a pretest and posttest using Personal Record of Communication Apprehension (PRCA-24) instrument as an assessment. The PRCA-24 asks respondents to react to 24 statements about how they experience apprehension or anxiety in various communication contexts (public speaking, small group, interpersonal, and meetings). The goal of using this instrument for course assessment is to see if students' communication apprehension (CA) is reduced over the course of taking a basic communication course. This is the assessment that had been previously done on the course I was directing. Obviously, it's a good thing if students come away from a basic communication course more confident with their communication skills. However, there are too many variables at play to actually make the data you get from this type of assessment actionable or even useful. First of all, communication apprehension can be what we in the field refer to as "trait" CA -- the result of how a person's brain is wired to work. Some people are more anxious overall than others. It's highly unlikely that one 16-week university course is going to reduce anxiety for someone experiencing trait CA. Second, this type of assessment has the underlying assumption that CA is "bad" and needs to be reduced. Clearly, CA that prevents someone from communicating to their best ability is something that needs to be worked on; however, CA isn't necessarily "bad." I've been studying communication since 1998, teaching public speaking at the university level since 2003, and doing presentations in courses and at conferences since I was an undergrad. You'd think I would score very low on CA. That's not the case. CA is a natural response to a situation that can be stressful -- who wouldn't be even a little anxious looking out over a crowd of people while giving a speech or talking to a person they've never met before? With all of my experience and expertise in communicating, I still experience CA. I've just developed strategies and techniques for managing that experience and even harnessing my nervous energy to make my speeches and conversations more dynamic.
All of that is to say that the assessment data I would get from the standard basic communication course assessment would not meet my needs as a course director. What I really wanted to know is if my students finish the semester with a clear understanding of the theories and skills we teach, the ability to think critically about argument and evidence, and a baseline set of public speaking skills that they can apply to presentations after they leave my course. So, I developed an assessment that looks at those learning outcomes (to make a long story short, my instructors apply a rubric to the "capstone" assignment of the semester, the persuasive speech, to determine if students are not meeting, meeting, or exceeding our expectations on the learning outcomes we've set for the course). These elements give me information based on which I can actually take action to improve the course and my students' learning and skill development.
Assessment is only valuable if it gives the program being assessed data it can act upon. Absent this, it cannot and should not be used to make critical decisions about funding and quality.
Ask any K-12 teacher in Ohio and I would be willing to bet money that they'll tell you that they aren't getting data that works for what they want to accomplish in their classrooms. How can one nebulous set of standards and assessments work for a classroom in an inner-city district in Columbus, a wealthy, well-funded suburb outside of Cincinnati, and a small town/rural district like Bowling Green? I don't believe they can. The standards can change (and they have) and from everything I've seen, they don't take a lot of variables into consideration. In BG, our own superintendent pointed out that the data being collected can be manipulated to make pretty much any argument the state wants to make about a district (http://bgindependentmedia.org/bg-schools-not-satisfied-with-state-report-card/). Which brings me to the politics point.
Do even a cursory Google search and you will find that the governor here in Ohio, John Kasich (yes, that John Kasich), is a big proponent of charter schools. Charter schools are basically a way to privatize K-12 education. That same Google search will also show you that the charter school system in Ohio is corrupt. Rather than summarize all of the problems myself, here is an excellent rundown of all of the problems: http://progressohio.org/an-incomplete-yet-totally-terrifying-ohio-charter-school-scandal-chronology/ . Charter schools divert state money from public districts. While Kasich and his minions in state government allow the charters to continue to collect state money, funding for K-12 districts from the state continues to be reduced. See here: http://innovationohio.org/2016/01/19/news-release-school-officials-fed-up-with-losing-local-dollars-to-charter-schools-call-for-a-funding-fix/. Public districts lose money to charters and are forced to go to their taxpayers for levies year after year (and in certain districts are forced to go up against the interests of diabolical slumlords who throw tons of money at defeating those levies).
My kids are Bowling Green City Schools students. Looking at the recently-released school report card, one "grade" in particular caught my eye. It was the K-3 literacy grade, on which BGCS scored an F. The reason for the F was how well the district was doing in getting struggling students up to grade level in reading by the third grade. My girls are in first grade and kindergarten right now, smack in the heart of that timeframe. This F does not correlate at all with our experiences so far. My current kindergartener went into the school year struggling a little bit with reading. We're less than six weeks into the school year, and I am already seeing that she's making progress. Literacy is a major focus of both girls' days at school and their teachers give me the tools I need to help keep them on track.
I wonder if that F comes from a couple of variables that the report cards don't take into consideration. Bowling Green has a large number of students living below the poverty line, like many other rural and small town districts around the state. If you're a parent who is struggling to provide for your family, perhaps working multiple jobs, perhaps under a great deal of stress, do you really have the time and energy to help your kid with her reading or homework? Do you have the money to hire someone to tutor or help your kid if you can't? The answer to both questions is not likely. My daughter's quick progress is probably partially based on the fact that I am tremendously privileged to work a regular schedule that allows me to do extra work with her on her reading. If I needed to, I could afford to get her extra help. Again, privilege. The fact that so many kids don't have this ability is an unavoidable situation that isn't the teacher's fault, or the district's fault, or even the parent's fault. And yet, the district is going to be labeled with an F grade for K-3 literacy. Why not provide the district with the resources it needs to help students whose parents aren't able to provide the kind of supplemental instruction needed?
To get even more political, I think it's a pretty safe bet that universal Pre-K would help tremendously with literacy in the early grades (a good look at the benefits of Pre-K can be found here: http://blog.ed.gov/2016/06/building-foundation-children-starts-pre-k/). In our district, there are lots of opportunities for Pre-K education, but only students with IEPs are guaranteed access to Pre-K for free. The district has an excellent and affordable preschool program (when my girls went through it, it was $6.50/per 2.5 hour day, snack provided), but a limited number of seats are available each school year and they fill up FAST. Outside of that program, there are many private options throughout the area, but they get very expensive (many are even outside of what my family can afford and we are a dual-income professional couple). Study after study proves that Pre-K gives students a tremendous advantage in school and in life, but in Ohio the state is much more focused on sinking money into failing charter schools that allow Kasich to maintain his tea party bonafides than into a universal Pre-K system that would actually benefit Ohio's students.
As a parent who also happens to be an educator, I maintain a tremendous amount of confidence and pride in the public school district that is preparing my daughters for college and life. A flawed assessment is not indicative of what is actually happening in Ohio schools on a day-to-day basis. There are always things that districts need to improve, but I'd be much more convinced by teachers and district administrators about what those things are and what needs to be done to improve them than I would be by the kinds of assessment and data the state is offering.
