8/21/08

Jennifer Smith Richards

Columbus Dispatch

School districts that cried foul last year over mediocre grades are crowing this year thanks to changes in how the state calculates report-card ratings.

The result: A’s or better for Hilliard, Pickerington and Worthington. Dublin, which expected to be downgraded this year, will receive an A+ instead.

But a lawmaker says the system still can punish districts too harshly for the struggles of a few students.

“As far as I’m concerned, it has not solved the problem,” said state Rep. Larry Wolpert, a Hilliard Republican. “We’ve been putting so much pressure on the Education Department about this faulty rating system that they had to come out with something, and they came out with (these changes.) Still, under law, a handful of students can bring down the entire rating of the school system, and that is a problem.”

Nine central Ohio districts were downgraded last year to “continuous improvement” — the state’s middle-rung grade — because certain groups of students, such as special-education, poor or non-native English speakers, didn’t do well on state tests.

But on Tuesday, at least three of those districts will rebound. Hilliard and Pickerington will receive A+, or “excellent with distinction” ratings, and Worthington will be labeled “excellent.”

Wolpert has been arguing that strong districts that don’t show enough progress for certain groups of students shouldn’t be downgraded. He has been pushing a bill that would allow such districts to keep a good grade but label it “conditional.”

Yesterday, he said that sort of label still is needed for districts that are generally strong but have weaknesses among certain students identified in the federal No Child Left Behind law. Even A+ districts such as those deserve an asterisk, Wolpert said.

Ohio Department of Education officials say it’s too early to tell, but they think that the complex school-accountability system has become more fine-tuned.

“It’s more of a political question than a validity question,” said Matt Cohen, one of the department’s accountability gurus. “Will there be political pressure to make further changes? We’ll be laying out the data and showing what has happened, and other people can take it from there.”

Hilliard, Pickerington and Worthington all would have missed federal goals for certain students this year were it not for a new calculation that predicted that their students are likely to improve over the next two years. (Pickerington would not have been penalized with a C, though.)

Dublin was expecting to slip from last year’s A grade to a C this year. Superintendent David Axner had urged the community to look past the rating and think of the district as winning.

Then he learned that the district would be given an A+, a new grade available to otherwise excellent districts that also show that students are learning more than a year’s worth of material during a school year.

“This is the first time that the accountability system really has measured what we call ‘impact data,’ the progress of the individual students,” Axner said. “We’re very proud of the work.”

This year, the “value-added” measure can be only a positive. But next year, it can be used punitively, too. Districts failing to offer students a year’s worth of learning for a third year in a row will be knocked down in the ratings.