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.
- They allow cities to assess their needs. For example, in Denver, pockets of low performance are concentrated in predominantly black and Hispanic neighborhoods, and seem to be limiting the quality of school choice options for some families. But the report notes the city uses its local performance framework “to determine where high-quality schools are located, which neighborhoods are in need of better options, which schools should be replicated, which schools are in need of intervention or support, and which schools should be closed.” In other words, the city intends to make more higher-performing schools available in high-needs areas of the city over time. Other cities – like St. Petersburg, Fla. – have pockets of low performance in persistently segregated neighborhoods that might benefit from a locally developed reporting system that helps shine a light on them.
- Does the state accountability system provide all the information parents care about when they’re trying to decide where to send their child? A locally developed performance framework could help supplement the state’s measures with information about school climate — like teacher turnover, student attendance, parent satisfaction or discipline issues.
- The CRPE report focuses on public schools (including charters, which in many places are overseen by multiple entities that measure school performance in different ways). But common performance frameworks could allow districts or cities in places like Florida, where private school choice is widespread, to give parents clear comparisons between public and private schools. Private schools are not subject to the statewide accountability system, but they do have testing data, and some might voluntarily participate in a local school performance framework. That way, parents could make informed comparisons among a wider range of local schools their children might attend.
As states, including Florida, prepare to retool their school accountability systems, it might be worth asking whether changes at the local level could help give parents, and communities, better and clearer information about their schools.
