APS lags in school grades; Rio Rancho district excels

The state’s school grades are in, and in many cases they are not ones a typical student would be proud to take home to mom and dad.

Statewide, A to F grades given to schools worsened as test results for the controversial PARCC rolled in. That was not unexpected, at least by state Public Education Secretary Hanna Skandera, who says the bar has been raised and a new baseline for improvement has been set.

Still, bringing home F’s and D’s, doesn’t play well in some households — and it shouldn’t in any school district.

Instituted in 2012, school grades are meant to give an easy to understand picture of each school’s overall performance. Grades are calculated using elementary and middle school test score data and high school test results plus measures of career readiness such as graduation rates and participation in advanced classes.

It is the first time the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers exam was used as a factor in determining grades for individual schools. In addition to PARCC scores, the Public Education Department used two years of the previous state mandated test, the Standards Based Assessment, to provide a three-year picture of school performance.

Statewide, school grades fell for 40 percent of public schools overall, and 58 percent for public high schools alone. Fewer schools got A’s and B’s than last year — 297 schools in 2015 compared to 332 in 2014. And conversely, there were more D’s and F’s — 333, compared to 323.

However, that’s not the case everywhere. And Albuquerque residents only need to look to the west for a shining example of a district that demonstrated that grades can go up, even with a new test.

Rio Rancho Public Schools, working with one of the state’s lowest per-student equivalent state funding amounts, rose to the top of the class nearly across the board.

Nine of the district’s 18 schools received A’s. There were no D’s or F’s.

Both of its regular high schools, Rio Rancho and V. Sue Cleveland, received A’s. Again.

Only one of the district schools’ grades dropped from last year’s grade. And that was a specialty school. Independence High School went from a B to a C.

Impressive. Kudos to RRPS — its students, teachers and administrators — for making it happen.

But while Rio Rancho educators, students and parents are doing high fives, things are not so rosy down the hill at neighboring APS, where the most common school grade was a D. And the number of F’s was higher and the number of A’s lower than the state average. Only one APS high school, La Cueva, received an A. Not so impressive. In fact, very troubling. One factor that didn’t help APS’s dismal showing was test participation. Twenty-two of the district’s 156 schools were penalized a full letter grade for failing to have at least 95 percent of their students take the PARCC — a standardized test, in fact, was a federal requirement.

So while districts like Rio Rancho and Los Alamos (Where the superintendent simply said, “in Los Alamos, we take the test.”) were pushing for academic success, APS was busy trying to assemble and distribute “opt-out” kits.

But test-taking is a part of life, in school and after, and if PARCC goes away something must take its place as a necessary element in demonstrating how much a student is learning and how well the school district and its teachers are doing.

Given that New Mexico is ranked at the bottom end in education nationally, more local school districts should follow Rio Rancho’s example. There’s nowhere to go but up.