State releases district report cards
The Ohio Department of Education today released its 2017-2018 report card results for the state’s school districts, including the controversial move of assigning an overall letter grade to all districts for the first time.
The report cards cover data collected on state-mandated tests that Ohio’s students completed last spring. ODE uses the data to create six grade card components: Achievement, Gap Closing, K-3 Literacy, Progress, Graduation Rate and Prepared for Success. ODE assigned Little Miami an overall grade of “B.”
In the spring of this year, members of the Ohio State Board of Education and some state lawmakers convened a work group to make reforms to the state’s report card. Many considered the report card in its current form confusing to families and unfair to school districts. The group made recommendations to eliminate the A-F letter grades and to change language to something like “meets standards” or “exceeds standards.” A state board resolution to that effect was tabled in July and did not come up for a vote before this year’s report card release.
Little Miami Superintendent Greg Power said that each of Ohio’s districts is different than the next, and no single-day snapshot can capture all that school district does.
“It is not the state’s job to assign winners and losers based on student performance on one day of the school year,” he said. “This negatively impacts the high quality learning experiences our teachers strive to provide our students.”
Power also pointed out that overall letter grades could be misleading to Ohio’s families.
“A Little Miami is different than a Clinton-Massie or a Mason or a Winton Woods,” he said. “I have concerns about the fairness of this report card, as many of these measures are correlated to socioeconomic factors. It is not a level playing field for any of us.”
The overall A-F letter grade is calculated using the following weights: 20 percent Achievement, 20 percent Progress, 15 percent Graduation Rate, 15 percent Gap Closing, 15 percent K-3 Literacy and 15 percent Prepared for Success.
Marla Timmerman, LM student services director, said some of the data included in the report card has good news to tell about Little Miami. The district raised its achievement score and the number of performance indicators met.
“I’m really proud of the growth in our students in looking at the improvements in our indicators and that we achieved a perfect score in our district annual measurable objectives,” she said.
Little Miami joined more than 85 districts throughout Ohio in releasing an annual Quality Profile that includes additional accountability measures that better define a high-quality education and are not included in the state’s report card.
