Comparing Assessments
I came across this great article via the ASCD express. It was written by Jennifer Booher-Jennings. The article does a great job comparing how hospitals and schools are graded.
“Only 41 hospitals—less than 1 percent of all hospitals nationwide—were identified as high-mortality. Yet in the 2004-05 school year, 26 percent of American schools landed on education’s comparable list—those that did not make adequate yearly progress under the federal No Child Left Behind Act.”The article does not proceed to criticize American public schools. Instead, the author compares how hospitals are graded and how schools are graded. Most people in education realize schools are not equal. It would be great if we could compare all schools as apples to apples. We know we must teach all of the kids who walk through our doors. However, I think we all also realize each child comes with their own circumstances and backgrounds. Apparently, hospitals realize their patients arrive at their doors in varying states of health. If we graded hospitals as we do schools, none of that would matter. If a patient arrived at a hospital, the institution had two options-restore their health or receive a failing grade.
States us a “risk adjustment” when calculating the “grades” of their hospitals that perform cardiac surgeries. The article provides a lot of the details but essentially it takes dozens of patient characteristics into account. The thinking is that hospitals should not be penalized for patients who are sicker upon arrival than others. Here is how the Health and Human Services Department explains it:
“The characteristics that Medicare patients bring with them when they arrive at a hospital with a heart attack or heart failure are not under the control of the hospital. However, some patient characteristics may make death more likely (increase the ‘risk’ of death), no matter where the patient is treated or how good the care is. … Therefore, when mortality rates are calculated for each hospital for a 12-month period, they are adjusted based on the unique mix of patients that hospital treated.”Following this line of thinking, educators could produce a similar laundry list of factors beyond their control that effect student learning: socio-economic status, parental involvement, student health and the list goes on and on.
I think when educators point things like this out, we are perceived as shielding ourselves from criticism. The article makes another great point about this notion. If we were able to compare schools using some sort of “risk adjustment” we would get a much clearer picture of how individual schools are performing. We would not be able to say that one school is performing better than the other due to factor X. If schools are graded in a more equitable format, we would know which schools are truly failing.
I have seen schools who do great on state assessments and schools that do not perform nearly as well. Does this automatically mean school A is better? What if school A is located among multi-million dollar homes whose children attend school daily and have private tutors to boot? What if school B serves a section of an inner city filled with crime and poverty? What if school B serves children who do not speak English? Do the test scores of each school automatically determine which school is better? Which teachers are better?
