An Overview of Virginia's New School Performance and Support Framework
The state education department says it set out to build a more transparent accountability system. Did they succeed?
By Adele Uphaus
MANAGING EDITOR AND CORRESPONDENT
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Editor’s Note: The Advance will publish analyses of how each local school division performed according to the new framework in coming days.
The Virginia Department of Education’s new School Performance and Support Framework is meant to be a “transparent and clear system” that “should clearly show when students are struggling and tell us what supports they need,” according to the department.
But to area administrators, the school performance scores* released by the VDOE on Tuesday—after a two-month delay—are difficult to understand and not indicative of what actually goes on in school buildings.
Significantly, the new system separates accreditation from student performance. For 20 years, school accreditation has been based on student outcomes, but now it’s based solely on whether schools are in compliance with the Standards of Accreditation found in Virginia’s Administrative Code.
In order to measure student outcomes, the VDOE developed the School Performance and Support Framework, which assigns each school a summative rating of either Distinguished, On Track, Off Track, or Needs Intensive Support. These ratings are based on scores, which in turn are based on points schools receive for three indicators—mastery of academic subjects, growth, and readiness at the elementary and middle school level; and mastery, readiness, and graduation at the high school level.
The three indicators are weighted differently at the different levels. At the elementary school level, mastery (how students perform on reading, math, and science Standards of Learning tests and on measures of English language proficiency) accounts for 65% of the score. Growth accounts for 25% and readiness—which at the elementary level only considers chronic absenteeism—is 10%.
At the middle school level, mastery accounts for 60%, growth for 20%, and readiness—taking into account both chronic absenteeism and the rate of students taking advanced coursework—for 20%.
The tool used to measure growth at the elementary and middle school levels—Virginia’s Visual and Analytics Solution (VVASS)—is already receiving pushback.
Matt Hurt, director of the Comprehensive Instructional Program—a consortium of public school divisions in Virginia working collaboratively to improve student achievement—told the Advance on Tuesday that VVASS uses “a proprietary calculation of growth that is not made available to educators. Therefore, they cannot ‘check the math,’ which negatively impacts faith in that system.”
Amy Siepka, director of research, evaluation, and strategic improvement for Stafford County Public Schools, said during a presentation on Tuesday about the new framework that the General Assembly will not fund VVASS going forward, meaning a different tool will be used to calculate growth next year.
At the high school level, mastery accounts for 50% of the school’s score; readiness, which considers chronic absenteeism, the extended graduation rate, and how students meet expectations for enrollment, employment, or enlistment, for 35%; and the 4-year graduation rate for 15%.
Siepka noted that at all levels, the framework doesn’t use standardized test pass rates to calculate “mastery.” Instead, it assigns points per student based on performance—1.25 points for an advanced pass, 1.00 points for pass/proficient, 0.75 points for fail/basic, and 0.25 points for fail/below basic. At the high school level, a failing score at any level receives 0.75 points.
This means the mastery index rate will always be higher than the pass rate, since even failing scores receive a point value.
She also noted that at the high school level, the mastery index reflects how the current senior class cohort performed on SOL tests over their four years in high school, not on how all students performed on all tests last school year. So the framework may be incorporating results from SOL tests that were taken up to three years ago.
Points received for each of the three indicators translate to an overall framework score out of 100, which puts the school into one of the four categories: Distinguished (90 points and above); On Track (80-89 points); Off Track (65-79 points) or Needs Intensive Support (below 65 points).
However, if a school has been identified as being in need of support and improvement per the guidelines of the federal Every Student Succeeds Act, the new system automatically drops that school to the category below.
ESSA requires states to identify the lowest-performing 5% of Title I schools for comprehensive support and improvement (CSI). States are also required to identify schools needing targeted support and improvement (TSI) and additional targeted support and improvement (ATSI), but the law allows states to determine how these schools are identified.
In Virginia, both Title I and non-Title I schools with one or more low-performing student groups are identified as TSI. They receive this designation if any student group (greater than 15 students) receives a framework score that is lower than the overall framework score of the highest-performing CSI school, and lower than the reading, math, and science mastery index rates for all students.
This methodology for identifying TSI schools is new. It changed along with the state accountability system.
Multiple schools in Fredericksburg, Stafford, and Spotsylvania were designated as Off Track or Needs Intensive Support due to the fact that they were identified as TSI or ATSI schools, even though their summative scores place them at a higher framework level.
Matt Eberhardt, deputy superintendent of Fredericksburg City Public Schools, said on Wednesday that the VDOE’s decision to link the state’s new framework to the federal designations was a complete surprise.
And to Daniel Smith, superintendent of Stafford County Public Schools, dropping a school to a lower framework category due to the performance of one student group is “not indicative of how things are at those schools.”
“Educators will feel like this is a slap in the face,” he said.
Nor is there any indication from VDOE of what kind of “intensive support” is coming for schools that have been placed in this category by the new framework.
“That’s not clear,” said Siepka. “We are waiting to see.”
*This link goes to Virginia’s School Quality Profiles, where readers can look up school divisions and individual schools. School and division accreditation status, performance level, and framework score (i.e. the results of the new framework) are included under the “Summary” tab. The Assessments tab shows SOL pass rates, which are not related to the framework score.
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