The Mississippi Department of Education issued the following statement.
The Mississippi State Board of Education (SBE) voted today to temporarily adjust the statewide accountability system so A-F grades for districts and schools and federally required school improvement designations can be determined for the 2021-22 school year.
On March 17, 2022, the SBE invited public comment on its initial proposal to temporarily adjust the accountability system for 2021-22. After reviewing public feedback, the MDE revised the proposal and presented it on April 12, 2022, to the Commission on School Accreditation (CSA), which approved the revised proposal.
Mississippi’s A-F accountability system and school improvement identification system consider several indicators, including how well students perform on state tests, students’ growth on tests from year to year and whether students are graduating within four years. Federal law requires all states to assess students annually in English Language Arts and mathematics in grades 3-8 and once during high school.
Adjustments are needed for the 2021-22 school year because the cancellation of assessments in spring 2020 resulted in some students lacking scores to calculate growth.
The SBE’s action today will adjust the accountability system for 2021-22 as follows:
- Growth will be measured on high school-level assessments from the most recent year students were previously tested. For example, current 10th graders who take Algebra I and English II assessments this year will have their scores compared to their 7thgrade assessment in 2018-19 to measure progress.
- 2021-22 high school end-of-course assessment results will be included, regardless of the student’s grade level. Typically, scores for students in grades 7-9 who take high school level assessments are not included in the current accountability year and are “banked” for accountability until they reach 10th grade.
- Any banked scores from previous years that would have been included in the current year’s accountability calculation will be excluded.
Scores for students in grades 7-9 who take high school-level assessments this year will also be banked, in accordance with existing accountability rules.
The U.S. Department of Education (USED) granted waivers to states from federal accountability requirements for the 2019-20 and 2020-21 school years because the pandemic disrupted schooling and state assessments. The USED now requires all states to resume their accountability systems and identification of schools for support and improvement for the 2021-22 school year but is allowing states to request a one-year addendum plan to adjust for missing data.
“Our goal for resuming accountability is to get the most complete and accurate measure of student learning during the pandemic,” said Dr. Carey Wright, state superintendent of education. “The temporary adjustments will enable educators, families, communities and policymakers to understand and evaluate how schools and districts have performed since the onset of COVID-19.”
Mississippi resumed statewide testing in the 2020-21 school year, with a 97% participation rate. The high participation rate provided MDE with a valid measure of student performance in 2020-21 and a way to measure student growth for most students between 2020-21 and 2021-22.
To address federally required school improvement classifications, the MDE’s addendum request will propose to change the frequency for identifying schools in need of improvement and the timelines and criteria for schools to exit school improvement status.
The MDE worked closely with the state’s Accountability Task Force, Technical Advisory Committee and the Center for Assessment to review and analyze assessment data to ensure the addendum proposal is technically sound and presents an accurate picture of the academic performance of Mississippi students.
The SBE invites public comment on today’s vote to establish the temporary rule to implement the accountability adjustment. For more information on the temporary rule and instructions for submitting comments, visit mdek12.org/PN/APA. The deadline to submit comments is May 17, 2022.
18 comments:
What a completely bogus agency the MDE is. Before Covid, and especially afterward - rules will arbitrarily change to accommodate as many numbskulls as possible to keep the funding flowing to the top. The system is on the verge of collapse because young people today have zero concept of producing results, or even attending classes. The leaders know this, and it's why the "rules" of "achievement" or "participation" are being modified to protect those fat salaries at the top.
Thanks 4:15 for your insightful thoughts and comments.
So tell us - how would you do this task? How would you set the rules to evaluate the schools?
You can tell us both ways of how you would avoid funding flowing and addressing the numbskulls. Make sure you give us your plan both in normal times and also to address the issues associated with the operations during the COVID pandemic.
Will be waiting with baited breath to read what I'm sure will be a scholarly and sound plan.
School Choice and Vouchers that enable competitive students and their parents, to the exclusion of overpaid fat-cat bureaucrats, to place their children where they can learn and excel, can eliminate millions in wasted, artificial education programs.
Castrate the Teachers' unions and State education hierarchy who treat students like cattle, let the best schools, teachers and parents guide kids toward excellence.
Kids with low IQs and bad attitudes can be placed in juvenile trade programs so they don't retard the progress of serious students with ability.
@4:52
Let competition and free market determine best schools by enabling parents to choose where to send their children. They know which schools are violent dumps and which are scholarly.
If the kids have demonstrated proven scholarship sufficient to qualify, parents could opt to access voucher funds for private schools. The money would come from eliminating 2/3 of education bureaucrats and teachers' union costs and closing under performing schools, like most of JPS.
Will participation trophies still be available?
@5:14 how did that work out for Nancy New and New Summit? Maybe you should define "fat cats" for us first.
This whole thing stinks. I’d like to be a fly on the wall at JPS. 🥴
4:52 & 10:25
Use of 1st person plural objective case four times implies pronoun identity issue, a pocket mouse, an alliance with one's shadow, multiple personality or the pretense of speaking in behalf of others on JJ?
The News fraud was caught out and their crime is not an argument against my proposal.
Well damn, I thought they were going back to when a 92 was a B and a 69 was a F. Under the current curve I WOULD HAVE HAD B average back in the day !
In the last ten years, MDE has changed at least four times how districts are graded for performance. After each change, the number of "A" districts increases. Much of the progress, including graduation rates, touted by MDE is nothing more than massaging the numbers to make themselves and the districts look better.
@ 4:15 "The system is on the verge of collapse" ??? What? MDE? Please explain.
@ Krusatyr Teachers are not unionized in MS. Next.
Moving the goal posts ? Again.
10:05
AFT MS and MAE are two teachers' unions in MS. Teachers here just got a pay raise that was not merit based, why not? Legislators probably couldn't do the math.
They have been flagging numbskulls through for years.
Watch out, Kingfish, I think "Krusatyr" is trying to take over your blog. Such a know-it-all on almost every post.
"Teachers here just got a pay raise that was not merit based, why not? Legislators probably couldn't do the math.'
I agree 12:20.
I have no issue with merit based teacher pay raises, or even increased property taxes to help education.
But is it asking too much to expect improvements
up to the High School level ?
It's great ... (in the national stats) ... that our third graders can now read a Dr.Seuss book faster than an eight year old child in California.
However, reciting "Green Eggs & Ham" is light-years behind the Chinese kids that understand the very basics of math and science at the same age.
Krusatr - There IS no teachers union in Mississippi. Regardless of the existing acronyms of various groups, they, by no definition, perform the role of any union to the benefit of any teacher. If you can point out that they do, I'll eat your keyboard.
Next: All this babble about school choice and vouchers...How are you going to transport these errant scholars to and from school? Is the next step going to be requiring the 'receiving district' to send its buses to provide transportation? And require the tax collector in each 'sending district' to set aside and send to the 'receiving district' a 'per head' amount of school taxes?
As to the repetitive posts about 'merit based pay' for teachers, please comment on how that can be possible when teachers are so frequently asked to make silk purses out of sows' ears, an impossible task.
If you work in a silk purse factory that bases its pay on merit, and your incoming raw-material trucks bring you shipments of sows' ears, how the hell can you achieve success or measure merit?
We might as well attempt to base the pay of legislators on merit.
@ 7:38 - The ability, ethic and success of those Chinese students have very little to do with the teacher and everything to do with their parents' expectations and 'home training' (as my grandmothers called it).
We learned this in the Mississippi Delta 50-70 years ago with an abundance of Chinese families helping build our communities.
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