The EFF School Report Card: Who Are the Winners?

Previously we've taken an overall look at the EFF school report card, along with the schools that it identified as being the very worst (or, in their words, the losers) in the state. Today I thought it might be fun to take a look at the winners--is there anything that we can learn from them?

For the school year 2007-2008 there were 15 schools that tied with a perfect 10 in the EFF rankings. Of those, 6 have had a perfect 10 in each of the last 5 years. Who are these high achievers?

1) Medina Elementary, Medina, King County. You know who lives in Medina? Bill Gates. Go to their census page and you can read lots of fun information, like how the average family income is well above $100,000, the largest number of families make $200,000+, there wasn't a single "Female Householder, No Husband Present" to be found in the whole town, and 99% of the residents aged 25+ are high school graduates.

I'm going to hazard a guess, but I'm thinking Medina may have it a little bit better that some other places in the state.

2) Lowell Elementary, Seattle, King County. From their website:

Lowell Elementary School is home to two of the Seattle Public School District's all-city-draw programs, the Accelerated Progress Program (APP) and education for Low Incidence Special Education students.

Accelerated Progress Program. I wonder what that is?

APP is a program of accelerated instruction in Seattle Public Schools, generally two years above grade level. It serves intellectually advanced students who meet eligibility criteria and whose learning needs are not fully met in conventional classrooms.

Ah. Take the brightest kids in the state's biggest city, put them all together, and see how they do on the WASL. It's not by chance that this is a succesful school.

3) Libby Center, Spokane, Spokane County. Of the 6 schools that earned a perfect 10 Libby Center has the highest percentage of kids from low-income families: 23.1%. That's a success story, absolutely. The secret to the success?

Tessera is a one day per week program at Libby Center for highly capable students in grades 3 - 6 who represent the top 3% of their norm group. Students are selected on the basis of academic, intellectual, and creative ability.

Yeah, but that's a one-day-a-week thing. Those kids probably take the WASL at their home schools. Where do Libby's WASL scores come from?

The Spokane Public Schools elementary and middle school Odyssey Program is a full day, every day gifted magnet program at Libby Center for fifth through eighth grade students.

Magnet programs: great for gifted kids. Alas, not replicable.

4) Island Park Elementary, Mercer Island, King County: Remarkably, all three of the elementary schools on Mercer Island scored a perfect 10 on the EFF rankings for the 2007-2008 school year. There were 15 schools to get 10.0, and three of them are from the same school district. Why could that be?

• Could it be the median family income of about $147,000?
  
• Or that about 30% of the households bring in $200,000+?
  
• Or the median home value of $880,000, which compares well to the national average of $182,000?
  
• Or that about 75% of the residents have a Bachelor's degree or higher?

Look, Mercer Island has a well-deserved reputation as a center of wealth in Washington State, where the high school kids drive nicer cars than their teachers do, where you go when you've made it in life. It's no surprise that Mercer Island has great schools, because Mercer Island is a high-achieving community with money to burn. Thta's why comments like this, from Diana Cieslak of the EFF, drive me absolutely insane:

“The reason we chose to do this is to equip parents with the very best info available,” she said.

“We feel that the ranking system gives them a useful conclusion that allows them to see how their schools are doing compared to others in the state.”

When asked why Mercer Island performed so well in the study, Cieslak suggested that parents should go and find out the answer themselves.

“That is our goal,” she said. “The school will have the answers.”

Absolutely, on its face, ridiculous. It's the myth of replicability that I've talked about before--a school is successful here, so a school can be successful there, too--and Ms. Cieslak pushes that myth to the most ridiculous edge.

5) Challenge, Mountlake Terrace, Snohomish County: If you're a terrible cynic you're probably going, "Feh! I bet it's a magnet program in some well-to-do school district! Feh!"

Sometimes, the cynics are right. Challenge is a special magnet program for gifted kids in the Edmonds School District, admission based on referrals and testing.

6) Cedar Wood Elementary, Bothell, King/Snohomish County: A school that's proud to be mentioned in the EFF's report card, they trumpet their high ranking right off of their home page. Mind you, they don't mention the EFF by name (they call them "an educational research foundation">, nor do they link to the EFF's web page, or to the report itself, but why would I want to read anything into that unless I was being snarky, right?

Anyhow, this looks to be an actual public school, in the Everett School District! I know, right? Weird! Going off of their school report card they have 6.2% of the kids taking free or reduced price lunch, about 15% in special education, and 100% fans of locally connected band Death Cab for Cutie.

Congratulations to Cedar Wood for what they've accomplished.


So, to review: 3 magnet programs, 2 of the richest elementary schools in the state, and Cedar Wood of Bothell.

There's a quote that I thought was Molly Ivins, but Google attributes to Ann Richards, referring to George Bush: "He's a guy who was born on third base and thinks he hit a triple." What the top of the EFF report card is showing us is not a collection of schools that have had to struggle to get their success, but that are maintaining the successes that the kids showed up with in kindergarten.

Another phrase that's been put out is "Cinderella Schools"; those schools that have socio-economic factors lined against them but that are still succeeding, like Pateros. I'm still mining the report to pick those out (personal and confidential to the EFF and Fraser Institute: spreadsheets would be nice), and that will be the next post to come.

Hopefully that's where the value will be, because there hasn't been a whole lot to learn from looking at the extremes.

Read more here, if any.

The EFF School Report Card: The Worst Schools in the State

(Second in a look at the 2009 Elementary School Report Card from the Evergreen Freedom Foundation. For the first installment, including links to the report, go here.)

The School Report Card sorts out the elementary schools here in Washington from #1 to a four-way tie for #1,127. The Simon Fraser Institute, which carried out the research for the study, says that it identifies the winners and losers, so let's look at the biggest loser schools in Washington State. These are the four that were called out by name in the media.

#1127 Wa He Lut, Olympia, Thurston County. An Indian school in the most basic sense of the word, Wa He Lut isn't a public school at all--it's managed by the Bureau of Indian Affairs for the federal government, and you must be a member of a federally recognized tribe to even attend. Consider, too, that Wa He Lut's low score is based off of one year's scores--they only have WASL results for 2008.

I remember being at an OSPI Summer Institute a couple of years ago where Terry Bergeson talked about the crisis in education surrounding our Native American students statewide, and she was right--less than half graduate from high school. I think it's a problem that needs to be viewed through a different lens than the school reform movement writ large, though.

Here is an example of where I question the methodology of the report--how can Wa Le Hut be called a "loser" school based off of one year's results, when it's not even really a public school at all?

#1127.2: Virgie Robinson Elementary, Pasco, Franklin County: 96.5% low income and 95.8% Hispanic, a fun school where Chicago White Sox jerseys and Ben Davis uniforms are banned because of gang affiliations. Where 75% are in the transitional bilingual program, 1-in-6 are identified special education students, and more than 20% are migrant. It's also 3 times larger than the Pateros School District, which will be important because of something I'll be posting later.

#1127.3: Muckleshoot Tribal School, Auburn, Pierce County: Not really part of the Auburn School District, not really a public school (it's 100% Native American). They're getting a nice new building, which is good for them. They're also at the bottom of the list based on one year's scores-2008-because that's the only year they have scores reported for. My guess is that's because they only have 83 students.

That's right, you 30 or so kids in grades 3 through 5. Mmm-hmm. Tsk, tsk, tsk.

#1127.4: Lummi Tribal School, Bellingham, Whatcom County: The very worst school in the state, says the report. The only school to receive a cumulative 0.0 score for the past five years, which means that in no year, ever, did they score even a fraction of a point in the EFF's system. This article from 2001 seems rather humorous in light of what hasn't happened--academic renaissance--but the humor dies quite quickly when you recognize that this has been an ongoing problem for several generations now.



"But Ryan," I'm hearing someone say, "Ben Chavis. Skooled. It can happen. Soft bigotry, low expectations, et cetera."

And that's fine. What I'm finding ridiculous here is the belief put forward by the report that some how, some way, it's competition that is going to make these schools better.

There are systemic reasons that some schools fail. It's these schools, the outliers, that prove that more than any other. The affirming-the-consequent conceit is to argue that if some schools succeed, then any school can succeed, and since Pateros is doing well, these schools should be too.

But conceit and rankings aren't going to help.

Read more here, if any.

Proving the Correlation Between Poverty and Academic Success

One of the joys of summer is that I finally have the time to process the various reports that I gather during the school year but don't always have a chance to read; I'm starting off with Report Card on Washington State's Elementary Schools 2009 from the loyal opposition at the Evergreen Freedom Foundation.

What they've done is actually quite impressive--a rank order, from 1st to 1,127th place, of all the elementary schools in Washington State. I have some qualms about the methodology--these rankings are completely WASL-driven, which makes them rank in another sense of the word--but if we look at the report more as a discussion piece and less as an evaluative measure, it has some potential value.

(Might as well dispense with the snark right away--I'm a union guy, a teacher union guy, and as such fairly well disposed to not like anything, ever, that the EFF does. That said, I've had pleasant e-mail exchanges with a number of their staffers, and while their beliefs are diametrically opposed to mine, I won't question the sincerity of what they think.)

I think the over-reach, though, can be found right in the introduction to the report:

Previous studies have shown that variations in student results from school to school cannot be accounted for solely by the personal and family characteristics of a school’s students. Many other factors—including good teaching, counseling, and school administration—contribute to the effectiveness of schools. Indicators like low income describe past relationships between a socioeconomic characteristic and a measure of school effectiveness. It should not be inferred that these relationships will, or should, remain static. The more successfully schools enable all their students to succeed, the weaker will be the relationship between the family characteristics of students and their academic success. Thus, this socioeconomic indicator should not be used as an excuse for poor school performance.

Laudable, certainty. The great legacy of the Bush administration will be No Child Left Behind, and I say that with the utmost sincerity--the focus on disaggregated scores, and measuring all sub-groups, and making sure that all kids are coming along--that's what we should have been doing since the beginning. It's never a comfortable conversation, but it's the most important one we can have. That said, in the context of failing schools and failing kids, "excuse" is a loaded word. Poverty and race should never be the excuse for a school's low performance, but to ignore those metrics as even being factors would be a hell of a mistake to make.

And frankly, the report itself backs me up on this. Creating tables in Blogger is nigh-on impossible, but here you can see a spreadsheet that I made comparing the top 15 schools in the state, those that earned a perfect 10 on the rankings, to the bottom 20 schools in the state, those that earned less than a 2.0 on the scale. The interesting pieces:

• Of the bottom 20, 19 of them are majority-minority schools, where the majority of the students come from minority populations. Only Oakville Elementary breaks even, with 50% caucasian students.
  
• On the other hand, in the top 15 schools, white students are always the majority (all at 60%+). In 13 of the 15 the largest minority group is Asian students; in the other two (both from Spokane), the largest minority group is mixed-race students.
  
• Each of the bottom 20 schools has higher than 70% of the kids coming from low-income households. 4 of the schools are tribal schools and don't report the percentage of their kids who are low income. Of the 16 reporting schools, the average percentage of low-income students is about 83%.
  
• At the top 15 the average percentage of low-income students is 6%. One school (Libby Center of Spokane) has 23% low-income; if you take it out of the picture, the average drops to less than 5%. At two of the top 15 schools, less than 1% of the kids are low-income.

The Fraser Institute, which has been doing these analyses on Canadian schools for a number of years now, is quite explicit in calling the high schools winners and the bottom schools losers.

By their metrics, then, the way to be a winner is clear: be well-off and white. It's also very explicit who the report thinks the losers are. That's a shame.

Read more here, if any.