MOUNT VERNON — On July 1, the Ohio Department of Education announced that Ohio is one of six states being given the opportunity to change the way school districts address the needs of students in accordance with federal No Child Left Behind legislation.
According to an ODE press release, Ohio’s proposal, which first needs to be approved by the Ohio General Assembly, would change how districts and schools are categorized when they miss Adequate Yearly Progress and fall into improvement status. There would also be modifications in the consequences faced by schools or districts in improvement status.
“Under the plan,” the press release states, “districts will receive targeted supports and interventions that best match the academic reason leading to the district’s or school’s under performance.” Depending on the percentage of AYP measures met, schools and districts in improvement status would fall into one of three new categories: Low support, medium support or high support.
Schools and districts in the high support category would receive the most support and intensive intervention. The plan does not specify who will provide the funds for the support and intervention.
Other changes proposed in the plan include:
•Schools and districts would move through the improvement process together, rather than being treated as individual entities. That might benefit districts such as Danville. In 2006-07 all three levels — elementary, middle school and high school — met AYP on the schools’ report cards, but the district as a whole did not meet AYP.
•The amount of time a district or a school has missed AYP would no longer be a key factor in determining improvement status. Student progress would be taken into account.
Mount Vernon Superintendent Steve Short believes that will allow districts to include value-added to the equation. That means even if a student hasn’t made the grade per se, but has shown an increase in skills, the district will get credit for that improvement.
“While a whole year’s growth is still the goal,” Short said, “I think now they’re looking at students more as individuals rather than, for example, looking at the whole sixth-grade class. ... It’s going to make the districts look at each and every student and consider if we are moving them along in a manner that they should be moved along, regardless if they are special ed, gifted, or whatever category they might be in.”
•Districts or schools that miss AYP for one group of students in one subject would no longer appear in the same category as districts and schools that miss the benchmarks for multiple groups of students in both reading and mathematics. There are nine subgroups identified on the district report card; this rule change seems to indicate, hypothetically speaking, that if one or two students in District 1’s purple group fail to make adequate progress, District 1 will be placed in a different category than District 2, which had some students in each of the purple, orange, green and silver groups fail to meet the standards in both math and reading.
•Schools and districts would be categorized based on the collective percentage of student groups not meeting AYP in reading and mathematics. Using the previous example, since District 1 had only one “substandard” group, its classification will be different, probably higher, than District 2’s because more District 2 subgroups missed AYP.
“Part of the issue now is that schools who miss AYP by a small amount are labeled failing, the same as a school who is missing it by many different areas,” said Centerburg Middle School principal Mike Hebenthal. “I think the feds [sic] are seeing that a school, like most here in Knox County, who barely miss AYP maybe shouldn’t be hit with all the harsh sanctions as schools who are really missing the mark in multiple areas.”
According to the ODE, there would be no changes to how schools or districts make or miss AYP, local report card indicators, or school or district designations.
Clear Fork superintendent Dan Freund is “cautiously optimistic” that the proposed changes will help districts.
“If we move away from a one-size-fits-all accountability system that currently shows only a snapshot-point-in-time picture of student achievement,” he said, “to a system that shows growth in a variety of measures, Clear Fork students will greatly benefit because their education involves so much more than what is currently measured [on the state tests].”
The proposed plan will not immediately affect the East Knox district, which met AYP last year.
“Since we were rated effective we are not in improvement status,” said Superintendent John Marschhausen. “If, in the future, we fall into improvement status for multiple years due to any specific subgroup, this [proposal] would provide some flexibility in our improvement planning.”
