School Ratings and Rankings Cause Educational Redlining and Resegregation

Here is the lead in a story in the Washington City Paper (Washington, D.C.) that describes not only  how public school ratings and rankings work in the nation’s capital but also their impact in every public school district in the United States.  Read this carefully:

“Before the pandemic shut down D.C. schools, each public school, like each student, got a report card. Every fall the school report card included a STAR rating, from one through five. The rating was based on a formula designed and used by the Office of the State Superintendent of Education (OSSE), D.C.’s education agency. Federal law requires OSSE to identify the ‘bottom 5 percent’ of District schools, so that they can receive additional funding. In effect, OSSE’s STAR Framework ratings used a measurement of need to indicate a measurement of quality.  And as a measurement of quality, the formula failed.” (Emphasis is mine.)

The author of the commentary is Ruth Wattenberg, who formerly served on the Washington, D.C. State Board of Education (SBOE). She explains that the 2015 federal education law, the Every Student Succeeds Act—the version that replaced the 2002, No Child Left Behind Act—requires all states to assign school ratings which are said to be a measure of need for the bottom 5 percent of “struggling” schools. However, in a place like Washington, D.C. with universal school choice, while ESSA requires states to rate schools to target the bottom scorers for improvement, parents use the ratings as an advertisement for the best schools in the system—perhaps the only evidence some parents consider as they choose a school for their children.

The ratings are always understood by the general public as a measure of school quality.

In a large city school district, when parents choose a school according to the ratings, these measures help resegregate the school district by income and race. Wattenberg explains: “In D.C., where families can choose to send their kids to any public school in the district, this flawed rating system is especially consequential. ‘Many kids have left their neighborhood schools’ because of the ratings, says Sheila Carr… grandparent of current D.C. students… A small exodus can trigger budget, staffing, and program cuts that have the potential to drive more families away from a particular school, triggering yet more cuts.  A decade ago Carr remembers, this meant multiple school closings. Although DCPS (D.C. Public Schools) has avoided more closures recently, enrollments at some schools are way down. Anacostia High School enrolls just 287 students.”

Across metropolitan areas where numerous suburban school districts surround the central city, the ratings redline the poorer and most segregated school districts and encourage anybody who can afford it to seek the the school districts with the highest ratings: the homogeneously white and wealthy exurban school districts.

Across the states, legislatures and departments of education have developed their own rating systems to comply with the federal mandate, but these systems almost always feature each district’s aggregate standardized test scores, which have been documented to reflect primarily family income.  Wattenberg explains the research she and her colleagues explored as they set out to redesign their rating system: “One expert showed us how high-poverty schools disproportionately got low ratings, even when test scores reported that their students had learned more than average. Education researcher and D.C. public school parent Betsy Wolf concluded that ‘our accountability system measures family income more than it measures school quality.’ Based on these findings, the SBOE resolved in 2022 that the rating system was ‘fundamentally flawed’ and recommended eliminating it… Education and poverty expert Sean Reardon says that average test scores ‘are the results of all the opportunities kids have had to learn their whole lives, at home, in the neighborhood, in preschool and in the school year.  So it’s misleading to attribute average test scores solely to the school where they take the test.'”

Apparently in Washington, D.C. the board came up with a new system that is not likely to be much better: “At the SBOE’s early January meeting, some parents’ hopes of pushing to revamp the report cards faded. OSSE surfaced its new report card, and, instead of labeling schools with stars, the new proposal assigns each school a number, one to 100, called an ‘accountability score.’ The number will still be highlighted on each school’s online profile and on the central School Report Card, where it will be among the first and primary impressions of a school that parents will see.  The formula that produces the new accountability score, while slightly revised and less toxic, is still biased against low-income schools. It is still the same formula OSSE uses to identify the neediest schools for the U.S. Department of Education.”

Wattenberg adds: “Less biased data on school quality measures educational practices and conditions known to promote student learning, such as teacher retention and the extent to which a school offers instruction on a variety of subjects, including social studies, science, and the arts, rather than an overly narrow focus on math and reading (which is what end-of-year tests focus on). Survey data showing student perceptions, such as the extent to which students feel academically challenged and supported is also an effective metric.”

From a parent’s point of view, the new summative grade tells no more about the teachers or the curriculum or students’ experiences at school.  It is really no different than the five star rating system Wattenberg remembers in Washington, D.C.’s previous system.  Here in Ohio, where I live, we have a five star system, which is no better than the A, B, C, D, F system we had before we got the new five stars.  In Washington, DC,  the new 1-100 rating number Wattenberg describes being earned by each school will only cue up competative parents to go for the highest rated schools in a giant competition. Most people choosing a school on the basis of the ratings will not be able to discern how the metric balances all the variables in each school or whether the rating really say anything about what is happening at the school.

Having attended school in a small Montana town, where we all went to the same middle school and high school, and having parented two children who attended our neighborhood elementary and middle school and came together at our community’s only high school here in a Cleveland, Ohio inner suburb, I prefer the old and more radical solution to the whole problem of school choice driven by metrics published in the newspaper or school report cards. In fact, for the majority of families in the United States, neighborhood schools are still the norm. A system of neighborhood schools embodies the idea that parents’ responsibility is to help their children embrace the opportunities at the school where they are assigned.

As parents when my children were in elementary school, we used the PTA meetings as places to strategize about how we could better support innovations and special programs to make school more fun and challenging for all the students.  A district-wide school support agency in our community provides a tutoring program for students who need extra help, and there is a community supported, district-wide music camp for a week in June when the high school orchestra director and his staff, along with a raft of graduates from the high school music program, help students from across the middle schools to prepare for joining the high school band and orchestra.  People from across the school district turn out for the concert that culminates the summer music camp.

This kind of community involvement connects parents with the community’s public schools in a qualitative way.  When people engage personally with a school, the teachers and the students, parents can learn so much more about a school than any metric can expose.

At the very least, it is time for the U.S. Department of Education to stop demanding that states rate and rank their public schools.  Wattenberg is correct that the ratings—a measurement of need—are misinterpreted by the press and misunderstood by the public as a measurement of quality.