How well are the public schools in your community doing? Whether you are a student, teacher, parent or citizen, you have a stake in the answer to that question. Unfortunately the statistics usually are not presented in a way that is helpful for evaluating schools objectively.
I want to point you to a source of information on school performance that you might find interesting. It’s an analysis of reading and math test results in every public school with students in grades 3–8, found on the website of the Public Affairs Research Council of Alabama (PARCA). The spring 2011 data have just been posted at http://parca.samford.edu/education/SystemsTestScores/Systems.html.
Alabama’s public school students take these tests each spring, and the results are published in August. PARCA compares a school’s results with the state average for each grade, subject and socioeconomic group of students. We then color-code the comparisons so that you can see at a glance whether your school is beating the state average (green) or trailing it (red). The colors are two-tone to show schools that are well above or well below the average.
Because Alabama’s grading scheme is lenient, we look at the percent of students who score at Level IV (in effect, make an “A”) on these tests. Statewide more than half the students in grades 3–5 scored at Level IV last spring, but results varied widely from school to school and system to system.
We believe these data should be used to celebrate success and target improvement efforts, not label schools “good” or “bad.” We find in our work that all kinds of schools and students can improve their performance with persistent effort. One striking example: George Hall Elementary School, an all-black, all-poverty school in Mobile. This past spring, more than 95 percent of George Hall Elementary students scored at Level IV on the math test. The results were virtually identical to those of Cherokee Bend Elementary School in Mountain Brook, which has an all-white, nonpoverty student body. George Hall students have consistently produced such results in recent years, reflecting sustained commitment to quality.
I hope you’ll look at your school’s results and congratulate its staff for the successes you see, while encouraging them to overcome any pockets of red that may appear in their results.
EDITOR’S NOTE — Jim Williams is executive director for the nonprofit, nonpartisan Public Affairs Research Council of Alabama. Jim may be contacted at jwwillia@samford.edu.
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