What Is A Good School?

The Texas Education Agency released their first set of ‘A-F’ accountability rankings for school districts and campuses this week. There has been lots of news coverage on the topic, and if you really want to dig in and more deeply understand the rankings you can check out this analysis that the education non-profit I work for created.

There was significant criticism of the proposed rankings before they were released, as many people suspected that the A-F rankings would be simply based on standardized test performance. Lots of research has been done that indicates that too often standardized tests are a better predictor of household income than of the quality of classroom instruction. Which is why many in education prefer to see an emphasis on student growth instead of just proficiency, and why people freaked out when our current Secretary of Education didn’t seem to understand the difference.

So when the A-F rankings came out, I started looking up elementary school campuses in my neighborhood to get a sense of how the scores were being calculated and what story the results told.

Rosemont Elementary has a very good reputation in the neighborhood. And as the neighborhood has gentrified and more families with young children have moved in, they are often encouraged by realtors and friends to either find a home in the Rosemont attendance zone or figure out how to transfer in. In fact, Rosemont is one of the most popular public school campuses to transfer to in the entire city of Dallas — nearly 1/3 of the students at Rosemont live outside the attendance zone.

Given the perception, the rankings were surprising:

 

Based on this it seems clear that the TEA is using a far more progressive system of weights and measures than simply STAAR test proficiency. Digging in to each school’s report, it becomes clear that the campuses at the top of the rankings were doing more to help their student’s growth year-over-year, and were more effective at closing achievement gaps between upper and lower income students and between students who are native English speakers and those who are learning English as a second language.

But worth remembering — this is the first year of A-F, and it will absolutely be refined and hopefully improved over time. And no ranking system can effectively distill everything that is happening in a school down to a single grade. These scores should really be used more as a flashlight to illuminate the fact that there are some really good things happening in all of our schools, and not as a hammer to pound teachers and administrators on any particular campus.

We have many great elementary school options in our neighborhood. There is excellent teaching happening in every single school on this list, and while Henderson, Hogg, Kahn or Botello may not be household names in some parts of the neighborhood, something special is happening on those campuses that we all should be paying attention to.

The point of this post is NOT to discourage parents from sending their kids to Rosemont. It is a great school with great teachers. Kids are learning and thriving at Rosemont, and the TEA report shows that. Realtors and neighbors alike should be proud to live in a part of Dallas that has so many great public schools to choose from, and should be quick to spread this good news to anyone who will listen.

My hope for the A-F rankings is that it dispels the myth that there is a scarcity of good Dallas ISD schools. Want to look up your campus, or dig into the data? The full set of TEA A-F rankings can be found at txschools.org.