The Mississippi Department of Education issued the following statement.
Commission on School on Accreditation Recommends Establishing New Baseline
of Mississippi Statewide Accountability System
The Commission on School Accreditation (CSA) voted today to recommend that the Mississippi State Board of Education (SBE) establish a new baseline for assigning school and district letter grades for the 2016-17 school year. The 2016-17 accountability grades will be released in October.
The CSA based its decision on the unanimous recommendation of the statewide Accountability Task Force and the Mississippi Department of Education’s (MDE) Technical Advisory Committee (TAC). The three groups agreed that a new baseline is needed to correct artificially high growth rates included in the 2015-16 accountability grades.
“If we don’t make this change now, school and district grades this year and in the future will not give a true picture of their performance,” said Dr. Carey Wright, state superintendent of education. “The MDE needed two years of results from the Mississippi Academic Assessment Program (MAAP) to conduct an analysis of the data and to establish a stable baseline.”
After the release of the 2015-16 accountability results, some districts raised concerns that their growth rates were abnormally high and could not be sustained over subsequent years. The growth rates were based on multiple assessment programs that were administered over a multi-year period.
Dr. Chris Domaleski, associate director of the National Center for the Improvement of Educational Assessment and chair of the TAC, said the unintended consequence of calculating growth on different assessments was artificially inflated growth.
“Due to the instability in growth, the ability to meaningfully compare performance from year to year is compromised. Therefore, resetting cut scores to establish a new baseline is recommended,” Domaleski said.
The 2016-17 accountability grades include a measure of growth that is based on students taking the MAAP tests for two years in a row. This is the first year with MAAP to MAAP results in which growth is measured with the same assessments and is accurately portrayed. This is the reason that a new baseline must be established.
For the 2015-16 accountability grades, growth was calculated based on three different assessments over three different years. The mechanism used to produce growth from different assessments was necessary to produce accountability results for 2015-16.
The CSA is recommending that the SBE use the percentile ranks it approved in 2016 to once again set the 2017 cut scores. These percentile ranks will remain consistent for 2017; only the numerical value of the cut score will change. In 2018 and beyond, the 2017 cuts scores will continue to be used for grade assignment.
The CSA’s recommendation also includes a provision that any school or district that receives an F with the new baseline that would have earned a D under last year’s baseline be held harmless for one year from any sanctions associated with earning an F.
“Without the new baseline, the accountability results that would have been produced would reflect the unexpected and unrealistic circumstance where results declined, despite other components improving and increases in proficiency across the state,” Domaleski said. “With the exception of growth, all components of the accountability system are performing as expected.”
The 2016-17 MAAP results show overall proficiency increased in both English Language Arts (ELA) and mathematics. District- and school-level results will be released publicly on August 17.
“The increased proficiency rates were out of alignment with the preliminary accountability results in that you would anticipate an increase in growth with an increase in proficiency rates,” Domaleski said.
“With the recommended changes, the accountability system accurately portrays performance for 2017 and allows for year-to-year comparability in the future,” Wright said.
9 comments:
so, is this a good thing or a bad thing?
Does the state have the resources to take over the failed districts?
12:54--when they takeover the school, they also take over the budget
I was thinking about the personal,I really think that is the primary issue in these failed districts.
When the teat scores do not turn out like you want, change the grading system. Simple math: adjust the math to get the answer you want!
It will make everyone feel good about themselves, the overpaid administrators can pat themselves on the back for "improving" their scores and the average parent -that does not have a clue that the board changes the standards as they see fit- Gets to brag about Juniors high level school!! And we wonder why Mississippi is rated last in every category!
Wow, that's one hell of a bureaucratic alphabet soup. Good to know we have so many acronyms looking out for the children of Mississippi. If I understand this correctly, the suits in charge of the schools and the suits in charge of the suits in charge of the schools, along with various other federal and state task forces of suits, all agree that the ever shifting bar of academic achievement was previously lowered too much in an effort to make the aforementioned suits look good, and that upon realizing this, said suits are scrambling to raise the bar enough as to not make themselves look bad. Of course, safeguards have been put into place so that if some unfortunate district finds themselves with an F rating due to the slight up shift in standards, all the suits have agreed beforehand that it would not really be an F, but more like a D with a warning. This all made me uneasy until I saw the quotes from not one, but two doctors who say this is all gonna be O-Kay.
It's about data integrity. That's a hard concept for most people to grasp.
Is it the dumb kids going to school in Ms. or the teachers that do not know how to teach kids?
Why should Ms. lower the standards just so kids can pass from grade to grade? Do the people, school administrators, and our state officials really think lowering the educational requirements is going to make the kids more intelligent and better able to compete with kids from other states?
Of course not. It just justifies the funding to continue to be authorized without any real accountability, all the while students of all ages are being led to believe they're actually learning something when in actuality, they are socially delayed, and bordering on illiterate. You're tax dollars at work people! Where's the accountability?
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