Parents care about school performance. That's one of the clear lessons emerging in cities, from Denver to Washington, D.C., that give families their choice of public schools.
But what if a state letter grade doesn't give parents all the information they need to judge how well a school is doing? What if it emphasizes student learning growth, rather than proficiency, or vice-versa? What if it doesn't measure other things the community might care about?
It might make sense for communities to make their own, locally developed systems that capture key information about all local schools, makes it readily available, and allow real, apples-to-apples comparisons.
In a new report, the Center on Reinventing Public Education calls this a Common School Performance Framework. Creating one allows cities (or, perhaps in Florida's case, districts) to easily understand what's happening in all the public schools in their community. (more…)
We've written in the past about the need to help parents navigate an increasingly complicated school choice landscape.
For the past year, a new group, EdNavigator, has been helping parents in New Orleans. This week, they've been sharing lessons in a series of posts on the Eduwonk blog.
New Orleans has a OneApp system that allows parents to shop around for different schools, and gives them some information to judge school quality. In this way, it's further along than most choice-heavy communities — including school systems in Florida. But the folks at EdNavigator have found information available to parents in New Orleans is still incomplete, and parents often benefit from a little in-person help.
Publicly available information often doesn't paint a full picture of school quality, or is hard to compare across different types of schools. What does a letter grade mean, and how does it square with percentile scores, proficiency rates or learning gains? A recent study of a school choice application system in Washington found low-income parents often chose schools based on performance information that was readily available, while better-off families were more likely to track down other information sources.
EdNavigator's founders note that once parents have chosen a school, getting useful information about how well their children are doing is also a challenge.
It’s also not uncommon for families to get conflicting information from teachers themselves, who tend to soft-pedal news about students’ struggles. They may downplay a poor grade or test result, leaving parents uncertain about how significant or urgent a problem may be. And when they’re uncertain, they generally take their cues from the teacher.
