In search of “just right” school ratings

Nishat987

In an effort to avoid prescriptive top-down mandates, the school accountability provisions in the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) allow states flexibility in determining what measures they’ll use to assess school quality, how much “weight” they carry, and over what time periods they’re calculated. These graduation rates are not as good as the cohort-based graduation rates introduced in later years, but they cover the same time span as the performance index and are based on calculations that account for actual enrollments and dropouts in every high school grade.


A recent descriptive study uses data from North Laos Phone Number Data Carolina to demonstrate how policymakers’ decisions can influence school ratings and, ultimately, the list of schools identified for improvement under ESSA. (States must identify their most troubled schools but have considerable flexibility in what to do about them.). Analysts Erica Harbatkin (Florida State University) and Betsy Wolf (U.S. Department of Education) draw on eight years of administrative data from the Tar Heel State—including roughly 1,900 public schools.






They develop three ESSA-compliant school quality metrics, all of which include proficiency rates, student growth, high-school graduation rates, English learner proficiency, and chronic absenteeism rates. The first four elements are required by ESSA, and the last is the most popular of the flexible “fifth indicators” that states select for themselves. The metrics vary based on weighting and the number of data points included (one to three years). For each of the three metrics, analysts simulate school ratings overall, as well as which schools would end up in the bottom 5 percent that require “comprehensive support and improvement” (CSI) as required by ESSA.