Bill to ease reporting on minorities by small schools
Many of Ohio’s smaller charter schools, and even a few traditional public schools, would not have to report on academic performance by small groups of students, including racial minorities, if a Senate-passed bill also gets through the House.
Ohio’s academic accountability requirements have stressed that schools should be judged not only for overall academic success, but also for ensuring that historically disadvantaged students are receiving adequate learning.
The Ohio Department of Education, Disability Rights Ohio and others are concerned that Senate Bill 216 would allow large swaths of schools, particularly charter schools, to mask poor performance in student subgroups.
Under the bill, unless a school’s subgroup of students totals at least 30, the performance of that group does not have to be reported for either reporting or accountability purposes. For report card purposes, Ohio’s current minimum is 10 students, while the number for reporting federal gapclosing data is being reduced from 30 to 15.
Under the bill, a school with 28 low-income students, 25 black students or 20 students with disabilities would no longer report the scores of those students separately to show how they compare to those of the full student body.
Michael Kirkman, executive director of Disability Rights Ohio, told lawmakers the bill makes it more likely that students with disabilities would be eliminated from reporting requirements.
“Without accurate data, it becomes impossible to quantify the achievement gap between students with disabilities and those without, hampering development of better educational policy for all students,” he said.
Matthew Dotson of the Ohio Education Association, the state’s largest teachers union, supports a minimum reporting size of 15, reinforcing that “equity be provided in instructional services for all learners.”
The provision is part of a broader education policy bill that includes:
• Allowing districts to give the third-, fourth-, and fifth-grade state achievement assessments on paper.
• Allowing schools to assign a teacher with at least three years of experience to any subject if it’s within two grades of their current license and the teacher passes a state test.
• Requiring non-teaching employees to be employed for six to seven years, rather than two to three years, before receiving tenure.
The bill passed the Senate unanimously in March.
Under the federal gapclosing measure, the Department of Education is reducing the minimum subgroup from 30 to 15 over the next three years, as called for under its new Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) plan. The bill would require the minimum to remain at 30.
“The needs of these students are no less important than others,” state Superintendent Paolo DeMaria told lawmakers. “I feel it is important to allow the phase-in as planned and provide an incentive for every school to focus on improving outcomes for all their students.”
In addition to subgroups, a 30-student minimum would eliminate report card scores for entire classes at some smaller charter schools, meaning potentially no score for items such as the third-grade reading test or graduation rate. The Department of Education, which is asking lawmakers to leave the number alone, has reported that more than 20 percent of charter schools have fewer than 30 students in tested grades.
But if the minimum subgroup size is too small, some school officials argue, a handful of students can unfairly drag down report-card scores for the entire district.
“We are all focused on ensuring high achievement for every student,” Ed Klein, assistant superintendent of Chardon schools, told lawmakers. “The group size of 30 seems appropriate not only from an accountability standpoint, but also from a statistical reliability approach where districts will be affected on their report card by increased statistical variability and increased standard error of measurement inherent in smaller sample sizes.”
According to Ohio’s ESSA plan, if the minimum is reduced from 30 to 15, the number of limited-English students included in subgroup reporting would jump from 52 percent to 72 percent. For students with disabilities, it goes from 78 percent to 96 percent, and for black students, from 90 percent to 95.
Data from subgroups can be used to guide how to spend resources in areas like reading intervention.
“Smaller schools will have no idea how many students are doing. This will have an especially big impact on minorities,” said Chad Aldis, vice president for Ohio policy and advocacy for the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, an education think tank and charter school sponsor.
“It will inadvertently hide student performance. That would be a real setback to transparency.”