AURORA | Terms like performance, improvement, priority improvement and turnaround don’t paint the clearest picture of how a school is faring.
Those qualifiers are part of the state’s School Performance Framework system, an assessment tool introduced by the Colorado Department of Education in 2009 that draws on data like academic achievement, growth, achievement gaps and high schoolers’ college readiness. Performance is the top prize, improvement is the next ranking and priority improvement and turnaround schools are at the bottom of the scale.
Districts across the state have integrated that system into their own assessment programs, but the School Performance Framework ratings left some parents and public looking for a simpler way to sum up a school’s success or failure. In 2011, officials from 18 nonprofit organizations launched Colorado School Grades, an online system designed to simplify the data. In place of the state’s four categories, the site assigned public schools across the state letter grades, a system some education officials say is too simplistic.
“It became quite clear that it was difficult to navigate that information. As a group, we decided to take the data that the state collects and translate it into letter grades,” said Scott Laband, a spokesman for Colorado School Grades and the president of the nonprofit Colorado Succeeds. “We use the exact same weights. The formula is identical. The difference comes down to instead of the labels, we use clear letter grades.”
In this year’s ranking, for example, Aurora Quest K-8 earned an A-plus, Cherokee Trail High School earned a B and Overland High School picked up a C-minus. Under the state’s School Performance Framework, Aurora Quest K-8 and Cherokee Trail got a performance ranking, and Overland received an improvement ranking.
Officials from Colorado School Grades say they use the same data as the CDE, and that researchers from the University of Colorado Denver crunch the numbers to come up with the grades. The main difference between the two systems, officials say, comes in the cutoffs. In 2012, about 70 percent of schools received the CDE’s highest rating of performance, more than 19 percent were ranked as improvement schools, less than 8 percent were given priority improvement rankings and a mere 2.4 percent picked the lowest ranking of turnaround.
“The clear difference is whre the cut lines are placed,” Laband said, adding that only the top 10 percent of schools receive an A grade, with the next 75 percent receiving Bs and Cs. The bottom 15 percent get D and F grades under the Colorado School Grades system. “Is it right for a school that is in the thirty-third percentile to be called the same thing as a chool in the ninety-ninth percentile?”
Big-name nonprofits like the Anschutz Foundation, the Colorado Black Chamber of Commerce, the Adolph Coors Foundation and the Daniels Fund contributed to the effort.
Some local education officials say the website’s letter grade system oversimplifies the CDE’s complex set of data measures.
“It’s a pretty complex system that underlies any of those ratings. Sometimes, you could argue, there’s a false sense of simplicity,” said Elliot Asp, an assistant superintendent with the Cherry Creek Schools District heading to a full-time post at the CDE in the fall.
As far as the state system’s cutoff points, Asp said that any grading system has to make close cuts.
“If School A had 50 percent and School B had 51 percent … it’s hard to say that those schools really differ. They just happen to be across the line from each other,” Asp said. “You’re always going to have, when you do cut points based on a particular percentage, some arbitrary nature to it.”
Reach reporter Adam Goldstein at agoldstein@aurorasentinel.com or 720-449-9707