Moriarty/ School District's Enrollment Declines 9 Percent
By Lee Ross
Mountain View Telegraph
November 1, 2012
Enrollment numbers for the Moriarty-Edgewood School District are down by about 282 students, or roughly 9 percent of its population.
That's based on a snapshot of the district's enrollment, which was 2,912 students on the 40th day of school, Oct. 1. Last year's funded enrollment - the number of students the state pays for the district to educate - was nearly 3,200 students.
For over a decade, the district has lost students every year, usually around 120 each year. While discussing this year's enrollment decline, Teresa Salazar , the district's learning services director, said that the new charter school, the Estancia Valley Classical Academy, can't be discounted.
"With the new school open," she said, "that was to be expected."
In addition to that, however, the 2010 Census also showed a decline in school-age residents in the entire area, Salazar pointed out. One reason for that decline is the cost of fuel, Salazar said.
"With the gas prices, people can't commute anymore," she said.
Another reason the school may be losing students is that some parents choose to home-school their children.
But in many ways, the district is really lacking hard data in this case.
Only about 40 percent of the families of the students who left the district this year bothered to fill out exit interviews. Salazar said the majority left the district to go to other schools in the area, including local charter schools, the Estancia School District and Albuquerque Public Schools.
Regardless of the reason, the district also has to plan ahead for the loss in enrollment from one year to the next. That, however, is a number the district has predicted with considerable accuracy from one year to the next.
That's important because much of the teaching and other staff are hired in advance. Salazar said District Superintendent Karen Couch does a good job of making the projection and avoiding a potential problem, however.
"We have adjusted our staff according to what needs to be done," she said. "We were pretty close to our projections. Dr. Couch does a great job at that."
Except for Moriarty High School, district schools have student populations between about 270 and 400 students. Moriarty High School has 888 students, and is only showing a loss of 25 students this year, as compared to a trend of losing about 75 students each year, Salazar said.
The final enrollment numbers are the net change in student population. Salazar said the district has between a quarter and a third of its population turnover from one year to the next.
That adds a layer of complexity because there could be no continuity in the curriculum those students have been exposed to.
"If people are moving, there may be gaps in the student education," she said. "Those are all challenges that we face."
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Espaņola/ School District Budget $400,000 Short, Furloughs Eyed
New charter schools siphon off students, stunt District's funding
By Louis McGill
Rio Grande Sun Staff Writer
November 1, 2012
The School District's budget could go $273,754 into the red if current spending levels don't change, accounting systems manager Elias Martinez told the School Board Oct. 24 at its budget work session.
With the future loss of funding after this year's enrollment dropped nearly 200 students, next year's budget looks even grimmer.
This year's shortfall comes from two major sources:
- last year's cash balance, which went back into this year's operational budget, and
- staff expenses.
The District essentially started with less money than anticipated, and incurred expenses higher than expected.
- Out of a total operational budget of nearly $31 million, the amount left over from last year's budget was thought to be $1.5 million, Finance Director Jeannette Trujillo said. That fund ended up at $1.1 million.
- Superintendent Art Blea said unexpected and unknown expenses came in after the projection, which cut into the amount projected during the budget process.
- On top of that, the District's budget is roughly $400,000 short.
Human Resources Director Esther Romero told the Board $300,000 of that drop came from the roughly 80 new employees the District hired to replace those who left last year.
- In addition to hiring long-term substitutes who received the proper licensing, full-time principals, and an associate superintendent, many new teachers hold masters degrees, which require a higher salary.
- While this will help the District's budget in the future when next year's state funding is calculated, the higher cost this year may help put the District over budget.
Because of the drop in students, the District is also overstaffed, Blea said. The anticipated number of students failed to materialize, yet the teachers had already been hired.
"We finished the school year with 'x' number of students in our district, projected to move on to the next grade. We had to staff accordingly, knowing we may lose some of these kids, but we didn't know for a fact," he said
Charter schools
Blea said they did not know what the full effect of La Tierra Montessori and McCurdy Charter School would have on their student counts when budgeting in May.
When asked if he could have anticipated some of the drop knowing what the projected enrollments of the new charters would be, Blea said he thought McCurdy projecting 584 students was optimistic. While it failed to quite meet that projection, the school still more than doubled its enrollment from its past life as a private school.
"The anticipated expenses are so much greater than operational revenue that now, unless we get unexpected revenue, and we may, then you've gotta go to the other side of the equation and lower that to at least break-even," Blea said.
Because of this shortfall, Blea said giving employees furlough days could be the inevitable result, and if that doesn't work, the District will be forced to cut staff to keep the District from ending the year over-budget.
"I don't see how we can avoid it and still finish the year in the black," he said.
Furlough days would give employees unpaid days off, effectively cutting their salaries. Blea said these would be scheduled to avoid any interruption in instruction.
Yet Blea said personnel costs will not be the only place where cuts are made. All spending will have to be scrutinized. However, those costs are the District's largest expense, and reducing spending in that area would have the greatest effect on balancing the budget. Furlough days would allow everyone to share the burden.
Mixed employee reactions
Espaņola Elementary principal Danny Trujillo said he would not mind furlough days for himself.
"It's something that I think they probably have to do," he said. "I mean, other schools are doing it, not only around the state but nationwide."
Sombrillo Elementary Principal Gloria Shuttles said she would just be happy for everyone to keep their jobs.
"I think we're at a point where as a district we need to pull together. I believe this isn't the first time the District has used that as a strategy to balance the budget," she said.
Espaņola Valley High School United States history teacher Francella Manzanares said she believes furlough days would get a very negative reaction from teachers.
"Obviously, with a teacher's salary what it is, I obviously wouldn't support that," she said. "I mean, there's other ways I think you can get around that, where you maybe have a four-day week instead of a furlough day because you can save on the resources that run the school and have a longer day."
She said she would take a four-day week with a longer school day rather than seeing her salary cut by furlough days.
"I know I wouldn't want to see my salary cut. I don't know how they can deal with that. It's already hurting us. The salaries haven't gone up in years," she said.
Blea said while he didn't have the exact numbers, to his knowledge there has not been an across-the-board salary increase in four or five years.
While it may be unpopular, Blea said there may not be too many options other than cutting jobs.
"I'm sure that nobody, including myself, nobody likes to have your salary reduced," Blea said. "That's not a popular thing. I'm sure people are not going to be happy about that, but it's a situation where it might be the only thing we can do."
The Board explored other ideas as well. Pablo Lujan suggested a four-day school week. Ralph Medina suggested closing certain Espaņola city schools and Coco Archuleta suggested putting year-round employees on a staggered schedule.
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Farmington/ New CCSD District Map to Offset Kirtland Growth
By Jenny Kane
Farmington Daily Times
November 1. 2012
The Central Consolidated School District approved a new school board district map at a special meeting Thursday evening that will reflect the growth in the Kirtland area over the past decade.
- "We've had a lot of shifts from the reservation to off the reservation," said Matthew Tso, president of the CCSD Board of Education.
The map was approved by a vote of 4-0, with board member Randy Manning absent.
"We went with a map that was to the liking of every board member," Tso said, noting that the population shifts are not drastic and likely will not greatly affect February's board elections.
"Most of the supporters that the district members have will stay in their district," said district Superintendent Don Levinski.
CCSD by law must redraw its lines, as must every other political district in the nation, following the United States census results that are released every decade.
The lines are redrawn to help balance out the number of people, but also the kind of people who reside in a district, taking into account population changes in the past 10 years.
By federal law, the areas within a school district, also known as districts, must have a close to equivalent number of residents.
- CCSD has five separate districts, all of which will have about 6,600 people in them after the new district map goes into effect in 2013.
- The population per district can vary by 330 residents.
Currently, District 1, which includes the northern Kirtland area, is overpopulated by about 1,000 people because of population growth. District 4, which includes the southern portion, also was slightly overpopulated.
Both districts have the lowest number of Native American residents, who, in most districts, make up more than 90 percent of the population, according to Research and Polling Inc., the Albuquerque-based company that created the district map.
In District 1, Native Americans make up slightly half of the population, and in District 4, about 74 percent.
Both will shrink slightly, putting more people in Districts 2 and 5. District 2 includes the northwest corner of the state, including parts of Shiprock.
Though District 2 will change little in population, it will lose some land area, which will be gained by District 3.
District 5 will gain the most land area, absorbing the southern half of what currently is District 4, including Burnham.
"(District 4) is a really awkward district," Tso said, referring to the district's current oddly drawn boundaries.
When drawing district lines, districts are asked to keep the populations condensed, but also to protect minority voting rights by ensuring that their numbers are not diluted.
Because the district's population is 85 percent Navajo, the state required the district to speak with the Navajo Human Rights Commission about its proposed maps, of which there were eight initially.
The board narrowed the eight to two last month before also speaking with members of the Navajo Health and Human Services Education Committee.
The extra hoops the school board had to take to approve the voting maps because the district overlaps tribal land left board member Manning disgruntled.
- "It doesn't matter what I think," he said before the meeting Thursday. "The governor gave the Navajo Human Rights Commission the ability to control the district."
While other local districts struggled to balance the distribution of low-income populations, Tso said it was not an issue for CCSD since most of the district's residents are below the poverty line.
The new map will go into effect in January 2013, just before the CCSD Board of Education elections in February.
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Espaņola/ Doctor Strikes Clinic Deal with La Tierra Montessori Elementary School
By Louis McGill
Rio Grande Sun Staff Writer
November 1, 2012
La Tierra Montessori will soon become the first elementary school in the Espaņola Valley to start a school-based clinic to serve its students.
While the school's governance board and administrators considered several other providers, including El Centro Family Health, they have settled on El Rito doctor Tamara Singleton, school founder Roger Montoya said.
Principal Sandy Beery said the only thing that remains is the completed paperwork, which she hopes will be prepared for approval at the next governance board meeting in November.
"I think she's going to be great," Beery said. "She's very helpful, very flexible. She's already figuring out how to do flu shots for our kids here and getting us some equipment for our space. We're just waiting on the piece of paper."
Montoya said Singleton was chosen because her philosophy aligned with the mission of the school. Singleton said she is interested in evidence-based alternative medicine, but only if the medicine can stand up to scientific scrutiny.
- "I think it's important to really go where the scientific evidence is, and to use these things with care. Just like anything else, there's going to be risks and benefits," she said.
Every medicine has side effects, and she said it is important to weigh options carefully.
- "One of the big problems with pediatric care is overuse of antibiotics and I think it's important to really be sparing and not over-treat these kids," she said.
Singleton said there is good evidence that the children who are prescribed antibiotics too often may develop more environmental allergies than they would otherwise.
Singleton will be working with nurse practitioner Dottie Montoya, who will handle most of the on-site work.
- The two have experience starting school-based clinics together after launching one at Taos Middle School.
- Singleton will provide the infrastructure for things like ordering vaccinations for families who want them for their children and billing.
Singleton said the clinic will be open one day a week. Payment will come from Medicaid, insurance, and possibly grants, she said.
However, she said she won't refuse care for a child without insurance.
"I don't see it as a big money maker," she said. "I think we could possibly break even, but community service is such an important thing for me. I just get a sense of satisfaction getting that started."
Beery said she is looking forward to working with them.
"They're about prevention, and they're about education and well living, learning how to make choices so that you live well, as opposed to just intervention and reaction," Beery said.
Singleton said her methods dovetail with La Tierra's mission because she acknowledges that every child and every family is different.
"Everyone wants to be healthy, but we need to respect what each of the families want and realize that everyone's different," she said.
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Santa Fe/ Estancia Valley Classical Academy Charter School Receives PED Warning
By Lee Ross
Mountain View Telegraph
November 1, 2012
The people who run the Estancia Valley Classical Academy are saying they know nothing even though a letter from the Public Education Department to the new charter school warns the school not to use the public's money to administer a Christian education to its students.
The letter is addressed to the school's interim principal, Charles Larry Miller and is dated Oct. 5 and is signed by Secretary-designate of Education Hanna Skandera.
- It states that the PED has received complaints from families that the school has a religious-based curriculum.
- The PED requested a response by Oct. 15 but has received none, according to department officials.
Miller, who is running for political office, said he has been on leave to run his campaign and had no knowledge of the letter.
However, Miller said that Christianity is a part of the world's history and literature and therefore is not ignored at the school.
"When we cover history and literature, it is very difficult to avoid Christianity," he said. "It's not that we're teaching salvation or something people would take exception to or that we want to convert them ..."
The school will teach creationism and evolution in its science classes, he said.
There is a broad spectrum of creationist beliefs, ranging from an acceptance of most mainstream science and a belief in evolution to a belief in the earth is about 6,000 years old.
However, one of the school's founders, Roger Lenard, said the school will not teach any kind of creationism. Lenard said the school had not yet taught evolution, but that it will follow the state's standards and benchmarks when the time comes.
He added that, according to his understanding, the school is not allowed to teach any type of creationist curriculum.
- "We will conform to precisely what the standards state," he said. "... If there is a line of inquiry and a student wishes to investigate some alternative explanations on their own, we certainly aren't going to prohibit that. ... We are going to take a technically rigorous look at evolution in accordance with the state standards and benchmarks."
But Miller said the school wants its students to be knowledgeable about both evolution and creationism.
"It's up to them to make up their minds," he said.
The school's current principal, who would only identify herself as Mrs. Mackrain, would not answer questions about the school's curriculum. She also said she had no knowledge of the letter.
Mackrain said she would speak with the school's governing council, then send out a written response.
According to Miller and a member of the school's governing council, Kenny Adams, the acting principal is named Tootsie Mackrain, a support services director who is qualified to serve as principal.
Adams said he, too, had no knowledge of the letter. Adams takes care of fundraising and facilities for the school, he said, and isn't involved in these kinds of matters. He added that the council understood what was required by the PED.
"From the get-go, we knew that we cannot be a religious school," he said.
He confirmed that creationism is taught along with evolution.
"Evolution is hard to prove repeatedly," he said.
According to the state's content standards for science, students are supposed to learn "how traits are passed from one generation to the next and how species evolve" and "understand that the fossil record provides data for how living organisms have evolved."
PED public information officer Larry Behrens said schools can teach additional theories as well.
- "Different points of view are encouraged as long as they are presented as one point of view among many and as long as they adhere to the standards," he said.
He said the Public Education Department is giving the new charter school some latitude for the deadline to respond to the letter. Behrens said the letter was sent by regular mail, meaning there is no receipt to show it was received by the charter school.
"We are being flexible about the timeline for their response since the complaints have stopped. However, we would still appreciate some assurance from the school that they are in compliance," he said.
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Washington DC/ Scores Drop on Kentucky's Common Core-Aligned Tests
By Andrew Ujifusa
Education Week, Vol. 32, Issue 11 [Edweek.org]
November 2, 2012
Results from new state tests in Kentucky-the first in the nation explicitly tied to the Common Core State Standards-show that the share of students scoring "proficient" or better in reading and math dropped by roughly a third or more in both elementary and middle school the first year the tests were given.
Kentucky in 2010 was the first state to adopt the common core in English/language arts and mathematics, and the assessment results released last week for the 2011-12 school year are being closely watched by school officials and policymakers nationwide for what they may reveal about how the common standards may affect student achievement in coming years. So far, 46 states have adopted the English/language arts common standards; 45 states have done so in math.
Two federally funded consortia are working on assessments based on the common standards, and those tests are not slated to be fully ready for schools until 2014-15. But Kentucky's tests are generally understood to be linked to the common core.
"What you're seeing in Kentucky is a predictor of what you're going to see in the other states, as the assessments roll out next year and the year after," said Gene Wilhoit, the executive director of the Washington-based Council of Chief State School Officers, which spearheaded the common-core initiative along with the National Governors Association. Mr. Wilhoit was also previously Kentucky's education commissioner.
Falling Scores
The drop in Kentucky's scores conform to what state education officials had expected: that students in grades 3-8 taking the new, more-rigorous Kentucky Performance Rating of Education Progress, or K-PREP, would not be able to reach their achievement levels of prior years.
Kentucky began implementing the common standards in the 2011-12 school year.
- The biggest drop came at the elementary level. On the previous Kentucky Core Content Tests, 76 percent of elementary students scored proficient or higher in reading in the 2010-11 school year. That percentage plunged to 48 percent for the K-PREP results in the 2011-12 school year, a drop-off in proficiency of more than a third.
In 2010-11, 73 percent of elementary students were proficient or better in math, but that fell to 40.4 percent. That drop represents a 45 percent decline in the share of proficient students.
- Middle schoolers' decline was a little less steep. In reading, they dropped from a 70 percent proficiency level in 2010-11 to 46.8 percent in 2011-12, a decline of a third. In math, proficiency-or-better levels declined slightly more than that, from 65 percent in 2010-11 to 40.6 percent in 2011-12.
Overall, students in grades 3-8 demonstrated somewhat higher proficiency levels in reading than in math.
When new tests are introduced, states can expect scores to fall in most cases, said Douglas McRae, a retired assessment designer who helped build California's testing system. "When you change the measure, change the tests, then you interrupt the continuity of trend data over time. That's the fundamental thing that happens," he said.
Kentucky developed its tests in conjunction with Pearson, the New York City-based education and testing company, which is also crafting curricula for the common core.
K-PREP does not represent the final, polished version of common-core assessments.
The Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers, or PARCC, and the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium are designing the tests that most states have signed on to for gauging students' mastery of the common standards nationwide beginning in the 2014-15 school year. (Kentucky belongs to the PARCC consortium.)
But Mr. Wilhoit said K-PREP represents the state's best effort, along with Pearson's, "to develop an assessment that was representative of the common core."
- Proficiency drops also occurred in the end-of-course tests in reading and math Kentucky administered to high school students. But those declines were smaller than those in the earlier grades, and a state study shows that while the K-PREP tests are completely aligned with the common standards, the high school end-of-course tests (from the ACT QualityCore program) are only about 80 percent to 85 percent aligned to the standards.
- The proficiency level in high school reading dropped from 65 percent to 52.2 percent (a figure 6 percentage points higher than the state's prediction), based on the end-of-course tests, while proficiency in math fell from 46 percent to 40 percent on the Algebra 2 test, beating the state's prediction by 4 percentage points.
Commissioner's Take
Kentucky Education Commissioner Terry Holliday said that students beat the state's predictions for both the K-PREP and end-of-course exams.
Using a statistical model that predicted ACT performance based on academic results in reading and math in 2011, for example, the state estimated a 36 percentage-point drop in elementary reading scores in 2011-12, instead of the actual 28-point drop.
"We're just a little bit above our prediction, which I think is a pretty good testament to our teaching," Mr. Holliday said.
Earlier exposure to the common standards, he suggested, would help younger students at first.
"It's going to take a little longer to see middle and high school growth on these tests," Mr. Holliday said. "It'll take about five years to see an overall growth of significance at all levels."
But based on national benchmarks, the new K-PREP tests may not have been rigorous enough, said Richard Innes, an education policy analyst at the Bluegrass Institute, a conservative-leaning Lexington, Ky.-based think tank.
In a report released the week of Oct. 29 for the institute, Mr. Innes compared the K-PREP math scores for 8th graders this year (41.5 percent proficient or better) with the results on the ACT Explore test this year (30.5 percent) and the National Assessment of Educational Progress proficiency levels in 2011 (31 percent).
"There are questions in my mind as to whether they are rigorous enough in several areas," he said. Different subject tests appeared to have been more rigorous in different grade levels, Mr. Innes said. The math in middle schools appears to be the subject where K-PREP is less rigorous than NAEP or Explore tests, he noted. He drew the same conclusion about K-PREP reading results at the elementary school level.
One number that went up: the proportion of students qualifying as college and/or career ready, which rose to 47 percent in 2011-12, from 38 percent the previous year. Mr. Holliday attributed that rise to the state creating more career pathways and bringing more introductory college courses to high school seniors to prevent the need for postsecondary remediation.
"To get that much improvement in the first year is extraordinary, I think," said Bob King, the president of the Kentucky Council on Postsecondary Education, based in Frankfort, Ky.
Preparing the Public
To combat a potential public backlash from the lower scores, Mr. Holliday noted that he had enlisted the Kentucky Chamber of Commerce as part of a yearlong public relations campaign.
Florida schools earlier this year endured a significant backlash when proficiency rates on its state writing tests dropped by two-thirds after a tougher grading system was introduced, forcing the state school board to change the test's cutoff score retroactively.
"We knew the scores were going to drop, but this is the right thing for our kids, our schools," he said. "You're going to see quite a different reaction in Kentucky because we watched what happened everywhere else," Mr. Holliday said.
But the transition for schools can be disappointing for some, especially in the short term. Carmen Coleman, the superintendent of the Danville Independent district, said she was proud of how the school system had progressed over the past three years from a ranking of 110th to 24th among the state's 174 districts, only to tumble back to the middle of the pack in the newest rankings of school districts.
"It's a tough blow for teachers and students," she said.
The Kentucky PTA has received grant money from the National PTA to educate parents and others about the new standards, but the state group's president, Teri Gale, said it doesn't mean people won't be caught off guard by the lower-than-usual results.
"They've heard us talk about it. They've seen the newscasts and everything," Ms. Gale said. "But until they actually see the scores, I don't think it's going to hit home that this is what we were talking about.
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Philadelphia PA/ District Suspends School Rating System, Seeks Fix
By Benjamin Herold [Additional reporting by Notebook contributing editor Dale Mezzacappa]
This story was reported as part of a partnership in education coverage between WHYY/NewsWorks and the Notebook.
Education Week [Edweek.org]
November 1, 2012
The Philadelphia School District revealed Wednesday that its system for rating schools is faulty.
The District has suspended use of its "School Performance Index," or SPI.
District leaders are now seeking outside help to fix the complicated formula that converts more than a dozen factors into a single score given to every public school in the city, including charters.
- For the last two years, SPI scores have been used to help guide a wide range of major decisions, including which schools should be closed down or converted into charters. It has also been used to evaluate charters' bids for renewal or expansion.
- Leaders of several of the city's charter schools have long taken issue with the index.
"We are, at this point, confident that there were some mistakes made," said new District Deputy Superintendent Paul Kihn. "We honestly don't know how extensive the problem is."
Kihn said the issues with SPI stem from human error in how the accountability measure was calculated-not from faulty data resulting from cheating on state standardized tests.
"They are two different matters," Kihn said.
A state-commissioned analysis of results from 2009-11 found evidence of widespread cheating at dozens of schools across the state, including 53 traditional public schools and three charters in Philadelphia. For the spring 2012 testing, after tight new test security measures were put in place, scores at many of those schools dropped dramatically-in some cases by 50 percentage points or more.
"I am not prepared to comment about the cheating matter in relation to this," Kihn said.
A Far-Reaching Tool
The District developed its School Performance Index in 2009, when Arlene Ackerman was superintendent. The formula boils down either 13 indicators (for elementary and middle schools) or 17 indicators (for high schools) into a single score of 1-10, with 1 being the best.
- For all schools, indicators relating to student scores on the Pennsylvania System of School Assessment (PSSA) exams are weighted most heavily, and measures of parent, student and teacher satisfaction also taken into consideration.
- High schools' success in preparing students for college and careers also factors in.
In an interview Wednesday, Kihn acknowledged the central role that SPI has played in:
- the District's Renaissance Schools initiative,
- facilities master planning process, and
- decisions regarding charter schools.
But Kihn stressed that the rankings were never "used as the sole determinant for any decision that we have made."
The measure will be disregarded altogether as District officials target several dozen more schools for possible closure by next fall, he said.
"Going forward, we've made the decision that we will not use SPI at all in the facilities master planning process."
Transition a Factor
The District first became aware of a potential problem with its performance index in May, Kihn said. In response, officials conducted an internal three-month investigation that concluded in late August. Action was not taken earlier because of the District's recent change in leadership, he said.
Kihn was not specific about the nature of the errors and how they may have impacted the reliability of the school's rating. But it is clear from the District's detailed online explanation of SPI that the calculations rely on complex statistical modeling.
- In addition to looking at the overall percentage of students in each school that achieved proficiency on standardized tests, i
- t used student-level data to calculate how well the school helped individual students make significant progress from year to year-the so-called "growth model."
- SPI also relies on the individual student test-score data to determine whether schools were able to narrow the racial and ethnic achievement gap between White and Asian and Black and Latino students.
"Because [incoming Superintendent William Hite] and I were just transitioning in, a decision was made to hold on taking any action until we could be briefed and make the decision about how to proceed," Kihn said.
The District's Office of accountability remains responsible for developing and maintaining the School Performance Index.
In August, the School Reform Commission approved the termination of Daniel Piotrowski, then the District's executive director of accountability and assessment, effective July 14.
Neither District officials nor Piotrowski would comment on whether his termination was connected to the problems with SPI.
Earlier this month, NewsWorks and the Philadelphia Public School Notebook reported that Piotrowski, who also served as the head of the District's testing security program, had called in March for a full investigation of the testing procedures at Wagner Middle School, where he had reported more than a dozen testing violations. Piotrowksi was removed from Wagner, and other officials overturned his judgment that an investigation was warranted.
Charter Concerns
Some charter operators have criticized SPI since its inception, claiming the District's numbers were not trustworthy and criticizing the formula.
"I'm glad that they recognized [the problem]," said David Hardy, the CEO of Boys' Latin charter in West Philadelphia.
But Hardy, who has long advocated for an accountability measure that puts more emphasis on students' postsecondary outcomes and less on their test scores, said his issues with the performance index go beyond a "math problem" resulting from faulty calculations.
- "What they need to do is change the types of things they're measuring and the weight of their measurements and take a broader view of success," Hardy said.
- "In an environment of school choice, parents have to have [good] information so they know what they're buying."
Kihn acknowledged such concerns and said he personally notified leaders in the charter community of the problems with SPI on Wednesday morning.
Kihn also said he recently received a proposal for how to improve the performance index from a working group of the Great Schools Compact committee, which has convened District officials and charter leaders to examine the issue for months.
"We are certainly taking those very seriously as a set of thoughtful recommendations," Kihn said.
Most immediately, though, the District is looking for an outside vendor who can recalculate SPI scores from 2009-10 and 2010-11, and calculate 2011-12 scores for the first time.
Kihn said that he hopes to receive bids by mid-November and that the work will take no more than a few months. All results and analysis of SPI in the future will be publicly posted to encourage transparency, he stressed.
Making recommendations about how to improve the measure will be optional for whichever vendor is selected, Kihn said.
