Public should know how schools rank

Whether it’s scholastic performance, popular music listings or even a foot race, nobody relishes a last-place finish. Chronic bottom-of-the-roster standings can be particularly demoralizing. That’s why numerous public school principals — including many at long-struggling campuses — are pleased by the state Board of Education’s move to drop annual ranking and classification of schools.

The impulse to spare schools any undue punitive feeling is a kind gesture. But this effort to accentuate the positive and eliminate the negative from readily accessible public view is misguided.

Doing away with the practice of compiling and releasing annual rankings for the state’s 256 public schools and 34 charter schools mutes public accountability to families, taxpayers and the schools themselves. Also, such shielding could easily blunt the natural desire to receive praise rather than concern, yielding classroom complacency as well as a potential erosion or softening of academic achievement standards.

What’s more, such a strategy will not succeed for long in a time in which anyone with middling computer skills can mine public information to produce and publish the rankings.

According to a revised accountability system approved by the Education Board last week, during the 2017-18 year each school will be furnished with an individualized annual report, and low-performing schools will no longer be labeled as failing under the state’s system known as Strive HI.

Plus, the reports will, for the first time, feature “local success measures,” spotlighting work that cannot be adequately measured by way of standardized testing. For example, a school may choose to showcase how well students fare on a yearlong project or track campus progress toward reducing suspension rates. Among other new Strive HI targets in the works: tracking the progress of English-language learners and evaluating school climate, which could include social, emotional and behavioral supports for students.

Few schools are identical in student body makeup. So, continued striving to assemble a more comprehensive school profile makes good sense. However, omitting the context of the statewide profile is a disservice. When a “failing” label is no longer an option, the state Department of Education (DOE) fails to openly own the reality of the results produced by the schools accountability system.

Put in place in 2013, the state-developed Strive HI system provides a more well-rounded assessment of student ability and progress than the federal No Child Left Behind mandate it’s replacing, which focused largely on test scores in math, science and language arts.

Strive HI has also measured: on-time high school graduation and college-going rates; the number of high school students taking and passing advanced courses; chronic absenteeism; and achievement gap between high-needs students — English-language learners, those economically disadvantaged or receiving special education services — and their peers on standardized tests.

Until last year, the annual Strive HI statewide report assigned each school to one of five categories: recognition (top 5 percent of schools), continuous improvement, focus, priority (lowest 5 percent of schools) and superintendent’s zone for persistently low-performing schools. In October, the DOE announced top performing schools from 2015-16, but did not provide raw scores and corresponding categories. It maintained that the changes were part of a “transition year,” and that the state’s accountability system would be revised under provisions of the federal Every Student Succeeds Act, which replaces the less-flexible No Child Left Behind mandate.

The BOE should reinstate the scrapped ranking and categories, and follow up with a call for analysis through which the public can see Strive HI’s annual results for what they are. Regardless of whether the shield remains in place, the DOE should step up its efforts aimed at helping underachieving schools make needed gritty strides.