When the Mississippi Legislature enacted this year an A-to-F system for grading schools and school districts, it was supposed to impose truth in labeling on the Department of Education and the board that oversees it.
The new accountability labels are an improvement, phasing out those inflated descriptions that dumbed down the meaning of “success.” The new system, though, is still far from truthful.
The Mississippi Center for Public Policy, a private, nonpartisan think tank that is good at peeling away layers of government obfuscation, has exposed some of the flaws.
It noted, for instance, that a lot of the supposed upward movement of school districts on the accountability ladder occurred only because the Board of Education voted not to consider graduation rates this year when grading school districts at the top two tiers. Previously, a district could not be labeled what is now an “A” or “B” if it had a low graduation rate.
The Center for Public Policy has also pointed out that for three years now, the Board of Education has failed to implement its own plan to gradually raise the bar in evaluating the state’s schools and districts to be closer to national norms.
This is where the math gets tricky, and where the Department of Education may hope the public won’t attempt to decipher it. I had an Ole Miss undergrad, Trenton Winford, explain it to me. Winford worked this past summer as a research analyst at the Center for Public Policy.
One of the main ingredients in determining the grade of the schools and school districts is their Quality of Distribution Index (QDI).
The QDI is based on where students fall in the four categories of achievement on state tests. The greater the percentage of students scoring “proficient” or “advanced,” the higher the QDI. The greater the percentage of students scoring “minimal” or “basic,” the lower the QDI.
The Board of Education knew in 2009 that if it set Mississippi’s QDI levels to the national norms, there would be an uproar when the results came in because all the schools would have graded lower than what their parents and communities had been led to believe. So, the plan was to move the bar up gradually over the next three years, hoping the schools would improve enough to keep pace. When that didn’t happen, the Board of Education just left the bar low.
“Top schools in Mississippi are really comparable to middle-of-the-road schools in other states,” Winford said.
The mislabeling doesn’t stop there, however. My own digging has turned up an even more fundamental dishonesty in the way Mississippi measures how much learning is occurring in its public schools.
Proficient on state tests isn’t proficient at all.
In Mississippi, to be graded proficient — which the Department of Education defines as “solid academic performance” — a student has to answer correctly only about half the questions on the test. He doesn’t have to know even that much.
On a 50-question test, on average a student has to answer 26 questions correctly to be considered proficient. He really, however, only has to know the answer to 19 of the questions, or 38 percent. That’s because he can guess randomly at the other 31. Since all the tests are multiple-choice with four possible answers, and the student has as long as needed to complete the test, the laws of probability all but guarantee he will get at least seven of those remaining questions right. A chicken pecking on the paper would get seven out of 31 right.
The highest category of student achievement, “advanced,” is equally deceiving. The average minimum score to get into that heady company is 78 percent — what on the grading scales used in most classrooms would be at best a “C.”
Perhaps Mississippi’s education bureaucracy doesn’t mean to be shielding its hindquarters with this intentionally lowballed grading scale. Maybe it just subscribes to that flawed education philosophy that praising mediocrity motivates students to try harder.
Regardless, the result is giving everyone in this state — most sadly the students themselves — a false picture of how much they really know.
Consider this comparison.
The U.S. Department of Education periodically tests a sampling of Mississippi fourth- and eighth-graders in reading and math. In 2011, the latest year tested, the proportion of students scoring proficient or above by federal standards was 25 percent or less. By Mississippi standards, the percentages were more than double that.
One of the criticisms of the heavy focus on state tests is that it keeps teachers from instilling in their students other skills, such as critical thinking.
Maybe that’s a good thing. Otherwise the students might start realizing how badly they’ve been duped.
