Here’s a sign of hopeful change. The federal government has used standardized tests as valid measures of school quality for the past decade. The Chicago Board of Education has decided to discontinue the practice. Accountability experts have cautioned against rating schools by test scores for years. The test scores are highly correlated with family income. Schools in affluent districts getvhigh ratings, while schools enrolling the poorest kids get low ratings and are likely to be punished instead of helped.
Sarah Macaraeg of the Chicago Tribune wrote:
The Chicago Board of Education has voted to adopt a more “effective and fair” approach to assessing the performance of schools, replacing the district’s School Quality Rating Policy with a framework shaped by input from more than 20,000 members of school communities.
The previous method, relying largely on standardized test results to judge schools’ performance, penalized schools serving predominantly disadvantaged students, district officials and research partners said.
“Part of what started this was our communities being very clear about the harm that they felt from a ranking and ratings system that didn’t just make them feel like it was something about their schools, but something deficient with them as people, as communities, as parents,” board member Elizabeth Todd-Breland said of schools issued low ratings under the prior system, which was in effect from 2013-20.
Shifting toward a model of shared responsibility, district CEO Pedro Martinez said the new policy will be more responsive to the needs of school communities.
Doing away with summative ratings, the “Continuous Improvement and Data Transparency” policy will instead measure a range of “indicators of success.” Those include not only academic progress but also student well-being, quality of daily learning experiences, school inclusivity and the capacity of staff to collaborate in teacher learning.
“We are really focusing on what matters most: what’s happening in our schools and filling out the gaps to ensure that our educators have the resources and the support that they need, so that we can get the student outcomes that we all want for our babies in Chicago,” Chief Portfolio Officer and CPS parent Alfonso Carmona said at Wednesday’s school board meeting, where the vote to do away with the SQRP system was taken.
How the policy was developed also matters, in fulfilling the district’s stated commitment to equity, said Natalie Neris, chief of community engagement for the nonprofit Kids First Chicago, which partnered with CPS in engaging parents, students, experts, the Chicago Principals and Administrators Association, the Chicago Teachers Union and others in the school accountability redesign.
“We can’t continue to say that we want to create systems that are fair and then not include the people who are part of those systems in co-creating and co-producing the policy that they’re impacted by,” she said.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
The standardized tests in ELA are a mess. They do not validly measure what they purport to test for. That these invalid measures have continued in use so long and have been accepted so uncritically ought to be a national scandal.
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How many articles have you seen in which so-called journalists or oligarch-appointed education pundits breathlessly reported standardized test scores as though these were indubitable scientific findings, without showing the slightest curiosity about or questioning the quality of the testing instruments or the validity of those scores? The puerile naïveté and blockheaded lack of inquisitiveness of such people is heartbreaking. So many education pundits, over so long a time, who were thick as a brick.
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And Duane S., PLEASE do not post a 50-page comment on from the crackpot ramblings of Mr. Wilson here. The problems with the tests are NOT those problems, and being clear about that is important.
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cx: curiosity about or questioning of the quality of those testing instruments or the validity of those scores?
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Real change is inclusionary. It treats all in the school community with respect, particularly teachers who have the best insights into what students need. Formative assessments are always a lot more useful and relevant than standardized tests. Data on graduation and attendance rates are more revealing than data from standardized tests. Let’s hope Chicago can show other cities how to make meaningful systemic change.
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Well, that’s a start. Next step is to get rid of rating schools at all. By nearly any “objective” (sic) “metric” (sic) you use, poor schools with high populations of people of color will score lower than affluent mostly white schools because the poor schools invariably have more needs and lower funding. If we really care about educational quality, we will focus on residential segregation which creates poor minority schools and affluent white schools in the first place.
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Absolutely right, Dienne.
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Socioeconomic and racial integration is a tremendous benefit to all students. Poor students benefit tremendously from attending a well resourced public school, and all students generally become more tolerant and accepting of those that are different from them.
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Right! And, good! At the risk of sounding like the old-timer giving unwanted advice–or talking about “the good old days,” I’ll go ahead and comment as an old-timer. Before NCLB, etc., we did have systems for evaluating schools. In our area (Midwest, etc.) we had The North Central Accreditation system. A team would be formed, including practicing classroom teachers, administrators, professors, etc., who would visit schools and look at “everything:” The facilities; texts; teacher qualifications; etc. We know, of course, today that such things are major determinants of the test scores we get from kids in various school situations. I think the Northcentral ratings were much more valuable than the individual student scores we now get. The problem was that knowing what needed changing usually involved spending more money–and taxing folks more. Republicans and corporate Democrats looked for easier answers–and found them in today’s system the tries to force the teachers to force the kids to work harder–or else.
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Compare the coverage of this to those about the glories of standardized testing.
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Who gets punished the most for being stuck in poverty?
The demographics of poverty.
“This number varied by race and ethnicity as follows: 18% of white persons (which includes white Hispanics), 28.9% of black persons (which includes black Hispanics) 27% of Hispanic persons (of any race) are living in poverty.”
“Dyslexia affects many people in different ways. At least 15 percent of the population is affected by a significant difficulty like learning to read. It has also been proven that 22 percent of the dyslexic population lives in poverty with 12 percent of all adults that live below the poverty line having dyslexia.”
“According to the report, over half of autistic children lived in low-income households and one in four was living in poverty, a higher rate compared to children without autism spectrum disorder. Children living in low-income households were more likely to be non-white relative to the general population.”
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Publications like the ‘NYT’ can easily ignore demographic shifts since it is easier to blame teachers and unions for the devastating impact of poverty.
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This is the positive PR that Chicago wants, but you are missing important pieces of understanding (thanks to the Tribune–grumble, grumble). Categorizing schools WILL continue. This will be based on test scores and a handful of other measures. One change is that the State of Illinois/ISBE will crunch the numbers, not CPS. See accounts in Chicago Sun-Times and Chalkbeat for a more complete picture:
https://chicago.suntimes.com/education/2023/4/26/23700014/chicago-public-school-ratings-assessing-schools-education
https://chicago.chalkbeat.org/2023/4/26/23699911/chicago-public-schools-school-improvement-policy-board
I spoke before the Board of Education to address the ways accountability is not changing in Chicago (because the laws are not changing). Please see this account of my statement: https://lisajeanwalker.com/blog/continuous-improvement-and-hard-a-accountability-in-the-chicago-public-schools-can-they-exist-together
Please correct the record. Chicago IS making progress, but it is also compromising at the expense of the Black community. CPS needs to do more. I have faith CPS can rise to the occasion, but not if people are misinformed about what is happening.
Following the twists and turns in accountability language and specifics can be treacherous, particularly when accountability systems operate at the federal, state, and district level. These system are independent of each other but intertwined. What is technical versus what is meaningful in all the complexity? A district like CPS can take advantage of accountability intricacies to gloss over or distract from truths that make it uncomfortable.
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Great input, Ms Walker. You put the horse before the cart: “Please commit to changing these kinds of laws.”
As an East-coaster, I’m not well-acquainted with Chicago newspapers [& Tribune always behind paywall]. If this coverage is any example, the Sun-Times’ reporting is clearer and more comprehensive than the Tribune’s.
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The Chicago Sun-Times is becoming my go-to source (I was a longtime subscriber of the Tribune). It recently was acquired by Chicago Public Media: https://www.wbez.org/pressroom/chicago-public-media-announces-its-acquisition-of-the-chicago-suntimes. There’s a lot of crossover of journalists from the local public radio station WBEZ. It’s exciting to see the strengthening of a liberal newspaper in Chicago. The Tribune leaves controversial stuff out. Its editorials in education are…well, here’s the piece it published on the new accountability policy (how would you describe this?): https://www.chicagotribune.com/opinion/editorials/ct-editorial-chicago-public-schools-accountability-20230501-gagsu7e4uzcrxnsjyzt2mflpu4-story.html
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um, paywall. that’s ok I’ve had my daily quotient of articles guaranteed to annoy me 😉
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It’s too good–the Tribune remains Chicago’s leading newspaper. The gist after referring to the ‘Maoist aura’ of the policy’s title, “Continuous Improvement and Data Transparency” and asking how we are going to know when to use the hammer on behalf of children and families is: “This is, of course, part of a broad move to the left in educational policy circles, away from measurable metrics and definable student outcomes and toward adding so much mitigating context that all criteria become subjective.” Thanks. I’m done with my contributions for now.
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P.S. To establish my credibility to comment on accountability changes in Chicago, I would like to add that I analyzed five years of accountability ratings for about 412 Chicago elementary schools from the perspective of high-needs schools. The patterns I found are described here: https://lisajeanwalker.com/blog/seeing-patterns-in-accountability-data-for-chicagos-high-need-schools
A former colleague/mentor at UIC credits this analysis (and our advocacy) with influencing CPS to make the changes it has. Of course, there were lots of other influences, notably the deep lack of trust that the rating system engendered. I understand as well as anyone the relationship between accountability ratings and accountability categories and that the burden of test-based accountability falls heavily on the Black community through both ratings and categories. To address this burden, deeper work needs to be done to change laws that categorize schools as low performing.
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Very. Good. News.
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I’ve been saying this for over twenty years. Stop giving credence to the test scores, the ranking/grading systems, along with the opinions and values of reformers. Stop listening to their message and responding to their crap talking points. Create your own system or not. But just Stop. If we, as the experts, flat out stop and ignore their metrics and the data worship and quit participating in this facade with “seats at the table”, the system falls apart. I mean does it honestly appear as though two decades of participation has gotten us anywhere?
For the love of god. Just please stop.
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