Last spring was the first year of the PARCC math and English tests, which have been dumped in favor of new exams. Ohio Department of Education officials say the tests got a bad rap, and the scores that will be released are important.
"There's a perception issue there, but there's nothing wrong with the PARCC data," ODE director of accountability Chris Woolard said last month. "We hear (complaints) sometimes. It's valid data. It's just got the politics connected to it."
But several local schools — urban and rural, high-performing and struggling — said they'll take the results with a heavy grain of salt, or barely study the scores at all. They pointed to problems with last year's online testing, the impact of students opting out of tests and questioned how the state could be confident in year-over-year growth between two different sets of tests and standards.
"We own the data ... whether we agree with it or disagree with it, valid or invalid, reliable or unreliable," said Oakwood Superintendent Kyle Ramey. "We have to take it and use it as appropriate, but at this time of year it doesn't mean a whole lot to us. ... The value of this information is certainly not to improve learning."
What's being released
This second and final piece of the 2014-15 state report card will feature results from state tests administered in spring 2015. The data is coming five months late because of delays in scoring the new tests and deciding grade cutoffs. Students, districts and teachers will have "safe harbor" from most consequences of the tests, and schools will not be issued an overall grade.On Thursday, the state will announce how proficient schools were on tests and list their performance index numbers, which adds credit for very high scores and penalizes very low scores. Woolard said almost every district's performance index fell this year on the harder tests.
The state also will release its "value-added" scores, which aim to show whether students made at least one year of academic growth in a year's time in reading and math. ODE officials said Wednesday that many districts still have appeals pending on that data.
The last piece is "gap closing," which measures whether all students are succeeding, regardless of income, race, ethnicity or disability.
Gail Kist-Kline, superintendent of Mason Schools, said the state's annual report card has lost value to local school systems and residents. That criticism comes despite the fact that Mason, like Oakwood, usually stands out for superb test scores.
"Not only has the state's report card become increasingly irrelevant due to delays and inaccuracies, the report card has also become less valuable because of its focus on a very narrow measure of schools — students' performance on state tests," Kist-Kline said.
More transition
School officials reeled off a laundry list of reasons why they won't put too much focus on 2014-15 test results.It was the first year of new tests; those tests were based on new, harder standards; online test-takers were sometimes interrupted by technology problems; coding errors wrongly listed some students in incorrect categories.
Springfield Superintendent Bob Hill said his district supports the state's tougher standards.
"In a perfect world, these results would give us a new baseline, a new starting point, so that we could measure how far our students' results are from the higher standards," Hill said. "But we cannot measure that using the current results.
"Not only did issues exist with the testing platform regarding paper/pencil versus online (scores), but we also know that the PARCC tests will not be used again in Ohio."
But Woolard argued that the report card data will be useful on that very topic, reminding Ohioans that while this spring brings new tests, they'll still be based on Ohio's harder, Common Core-tied standards, just like last year.
"This is still incredibly useful information for educators, communities and parents," Woolard said. "This is the first chance for folks to really take a look at just what student performance looks like against Ohio's new, higher expectations.
"It's a chance for districts to reset their expectations based on a higher bar."
©2016 the Dayton Daily News (Dayton, Ohio), distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
