Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, July 30, 1990 TAG: 9007300225
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A/3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Landmark News Service
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
It will count how many Roanoke students take algebra in eighth grade, and how high they score on standardized tests. It will see how many elementary school graduates become college graduates.
It will help parents in one community see how their schools' vocational programs compare with others in the state.
And it will form the basis for state policymakers to pick the state's strongest and weakest schools, and dole out millions of dollars to both.
So it's hardly surprising that the program, known as Educational Performance Recognition, is drawing a lot of attention from educators and parents' groups, even though it's nearly two years from producing its first reports.
Supporters call EPR the nation's most comprehensive effort to judge schools using statistics. They contend it will give teachers, parents and administrators in many communities a raft of new information they can use to improve programs and polish classroom techniques.
Supporters also say it could reduce the dominance of standardized test scores as a yardstick of school performance.
People shopping for school zones could examine a wide range of other numbers, from the number of high school students taking advanced placement courses to the percentage who find jobs when they graduate.
The system could give parents access to a statistical banquet, comparable with what baseball fans can get on their favorite teams and players, or investors can check before buying stocks and bonds.
But among school administrators, who would have to deal with it day to day, EPR, dubbed "Erp," has aroused everything from puzzlement to outright hostility. Some worry that the comparisons will put them in an unfavorable light. Many complain that gathering the data the state wants will be a paper-work nightmare.
The superintendent of the Fairfax County School System, the state's largest, has called for drastically scaling down the program. Beatrice Cameron, Fairfax's associate superintendent, calls the new system "extremely burdensome and complex. If the overall objective is to identify subdivisions that need to improve, there's a much more direct and simple way to identify that."
And critics of standardized tests note that the biggest component of EPR - about one-fourth of it - continues to be test scores. That makes EPR a flawed measure of how well schools are preparing students for the real world, they say.
"They're missing the whole point," said W. Preston Burton, assistant superintendent of instruction for the Portsmouth schools. "Whether kids can speak well, write well, listen well, that isn't being measured. Everything that helps kids when they get out of school isn't being measured."
Despite such objections, the state Board of Education, which ordered EPR, and Secretary of Education James W. Dyke, an enthusiastic supporter, are unlikely to back down.
"I don't think there's any escape from accountability," said Timothy Sullivan, a Board of Education member and dean of the College of William and Mary's Marshall-Wythe law school. "If public education expects continued support, it is going to have to accept measurement of results. It's as simple as that."
Some observers argue that it's going to come down to a political struggle over who looks good and who looks bad under the new evaluation system.
"If there's any potential for people losing ground that they hold under the present system, I think you'll hear people objecting to this plan," said Helen G. Rolfe, director of professional development for the Virginia Education Association, the state's largest teachers' group.
Paul Stapleton, superintendent of the rural Charlotte County schools, acknowledged that for schools comparing poorly under the new system, "the tenure for superintendents might be very short."
Emmett Ridley, supervisor of the project for the state Department of Education, has heard all the complaints.
"I don't blame folks for being concerned about how they're going to look," he said. "But if we don't look at this data to see how we're doing, we don't necessarily take those steps to improve our performance."
Ironically, EPR started out as an effort to simplify the way the state regulates public schools. Instead of counting the books in the library and measuring the number of square feet in the cafeteria, state officials reasoned, why not measure whether schools are actually doing the job?
But from that simple idea has evolved a stunningly complex array of numbers and formulas.
It starts with a list of 77 "indicators" of student performance. To determine how well schools prepare students for college, for example, the state will compile 14 statistics, including how many students take the SAT, how many take algebra in eighth grade, and how many score in the top 25 percentiles on standardized tests.
Officials hope to collect the information by individual pupil number. While individual performance would be kept confidential, the figures would allow researchers to do sophisticated tracking of groups of pupils over a long period.
For instance, the computer system could find out how many pupils who failed the recent "literacy passport" tests in sixth grade also fail to graduate from high school.
Officials even are hoping to collect data from Virginia colleges on the grades earned by students from the state's high schools.
To make comparisons between schools fair, the state has put together computer-generated "comparison groups" of schools that serve statistically similar populations.
Under the system, for example, Virginia Beach would be compared with 14 fast-growing suburban areas like Newport News and Prince William County in Northern Virginia. Portsmouth's comparison group includes other older cities such as Richmond and Petersburg.
But not everyone is happy with the comparison-group concept.
"You could be in a band of very fine school systems, be the lowest school system in that band, and still be higher than any other school system of the state," said Henrico County Superintendent William C. Bosher Jr., whose suburban Richmond school system usually scores high on standardized tests.
Bosher said he would prefer to have statewide benchmarks of good school performance set for every system to aim at "rather than offering the pursuit of the Holy Grail."
Another layer of complexity could be added when state officials try to set up comparison groups for individual schools. That way, for instance, parents and educators at Deep Creek High School in Chesapeake could compare themselves with other high schools around the state serving similar populations.
"I would say that simplicity is elegance," said Fairfax's Associate Superintendent Cameron. The system is so complex it's "very vulnerable to increasing the stakes for schools and school divisions to manipulate the data," she said.
by CNB