(
From Yelp to Amazon, five-star reviews are on just about everything. And now they’re coming to public schools in D.C. Starting in December, local schools will be rated on a scale of one to five, based on exam scores, student growth during the year, absenteeism, how well they support English Language Learners, and other factors.
The rating system is part of a larger “school report card,” an accountability system mandated by the Obama administration’s Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA). The 2015 federal legislation requires states and districts to create data portals that present school information in “language that parents can understand” by the end of 2018.
Do schools have to have one-to-five star rankings?
No. Some states have decided to use letter grades (A, B, C, D, F). A few states, like California, have opted not to give an overall ranking to schools, encouraging parents and community members to look at several different data points to understand how a school is performing. In states that give an overall ranking, the data behind those grades will also be available for parents.
Schools in Maryland are also using a five-star system while those in Virginia have a tiered system, based on how much “support” schools need.
What goes into a school ranking, and are they the same state-to-state?
Many of the indicators measured in the D.C. star rating system are similar to rankings in other states. That uniformity is mostly because ESSA requires states and local report cards to include certain measures such as academic performance on standardized test, graduation rates, student growth, and the percentage of English learners achieving proficiency.
But there is also some flexibility in what measures states can include in their rankings. For example, D.C.’s star ranking system also includes school environmental factors such as attendance, the number of students who re-enroll in a particular school, and emotional support for pre-kindergarten students. The Maryland star system also includes absenteeism. The Virginia school report cards include attendance rates and the number of suspensions and expulsions in a school.
Are these rankings fair?
Some parents and public school advocates are against the idea of giving schools rankings like this. They worry that the ratings will fail to capture more qualitative features such as student relationships with principals or the availability of after-school programs. Some qualitative measures, like the availability of school daycares, will be covered in the overall report card in D.C., but they won’t be reflected in the five-star rating.
And there’s also some concern that parents won’t look beyond the ranking. Becky Reina, a mother of two children at Cleveland Elementary in Washington, D.C., told WAMU she’s worried parents might “see the star rating and think that is everything you need to know about the school.” And that could cause parents to choose not to send their children to one or two-star campuses. This, she says, could hurt those schools, which may be cash-strapped or have high populations of at-risk students.
Is the District worried about parents leaving schools?
D.C. State Superintendent of Education Hanseul Kang doesn’t foresee a future where parents are fleeing schools. She says the rating system offers communities a starting point to begin discussing collaborative improvement plans.
“The schools down the street, for example, may have a very similar population to yours but may be doing better when it comes to serving English Learners,” she says. “It gives us a chance to see that data in a more easily accessible way. And to think about, ‘What can I do, how can I go visit that school and see what they are doing? What might I be able to bring back to my own school to think about how to improve.”
What happens if a school gets a low ranking?
Paige Kowalski, the executive director of the Data Quality Campaign, says districts should provide resources to support schools with low rankings. Her nonprofit organization has reviewed and provided guidance on school report card data to multiple Congressional officials.
“The most important thing states can do with all of this data is turn this data over to communities,” says Kowalski. “Provide them with the resources they need to make sense of [the data] and move forward.”
This story originally appeared on WAMU.
