[B]ARRE — The Vermont Agency of Education has released its first Annual Snapshot, a new online dashboard that will allow anyone to take a look at how each of the state’s public K-12 schools are doing, using a variety of new indicators.
The Snapshot is an intentional pivot away from the standardized-testing focused era of the federal No Child Left Behind Act, which was widely criticized by educators — particularly in Vermont — for emphasizing too narrow a measure of school performance. The successor law to NCLB, the Every Student Succeeds Act, still requires testing, but it also allows states to name several new standards for appraising schools.
Issues with the agency’s data collection system has slowed the launch of the new dashboard. But once fully operational, the Snapshot aims to allow the public to see not just traditional measures of school performance – like test scores and graduation rates – but also information about school climate, staffing quality, spending priorities, and personalization.
“This is a Vermont-centered approach to assessing school performance, using measures chosen by Vermonters,” Secretary of Education Dan French said at a press conference on Thursday in Barre.
To help the public navigate the new tool, the agency has created a user guide as well as several videos to explain key terms and concepts.
But while the Snapshot includes a slew of new measures for gauging school quality, the public will need to wait some time longer before seeing any data related to most of those measures. Only data on academic proficiency – based on test scores and graduation rates – are presently available. Agency officials say a second round of data will be submitted into the system by December 2019, and that all indicators should be online by December 2020.
Agency officials had always intended to have a staggered rollout to the Snapshot. But its initial release is itself about six months behind schedule. That’s because of problems with the rollout of Vermont’s “Statewide Longitudinal Data System,” a centralized data collection system intended to accommodate the many ways local school districts record and store student data. Districts have struggled to adjust to the new system, and the agency has struggled to help districts and correct improper data entries.
“Because we have so many different data systems at the local level, it’s really challenging and complex to get that data to report up,” French said.
Academic measures in the Snapshot will look different than what has been traditionally reported to the public. Instead of reporting what percentage of students have achieved so-called “proficiency” on a given standardized test, the agency will instead say whether a school or district is “not meeting,” “approaching,” “meeting,” or “exceeding” performance targets.
Raw test scores will still be available through the state’s previous portal for reporting achievement data. Results for the 2017-2018 school year, which were originally supposed to come out this fall, aren’t available yet but will be within the next couple of weeks, agency officials said Thursday.
The Snapshot will also emphasize measures of academic quality that many education officials have long argued were under-valued in the NCLB era. It includes several indicators highlighting how well – or poorly – performance improves over time, and as an “Equity Index,” which attempts to capture whether schools are successfully narrowing the achievement gap.
The Snapshot also introduces a new category of students — those who are “historically marginalized” — in an attempt to make more granular reporting possible in smaller schools. That’s because, in districts where student populations are small, it’s often impossible to disaggregate results by categories like race without risking revealing information about a particular student.
The “historically marginalized” category collapses information for several groups of students — those who are low-income, on special education plans, or members of a minority ethnic group — in order to create a larger cohort.
The agency also on Thursday identified those schools eligible for “Equity Supports” under ESSA, based on performance gaps between “historically marginalized” students and their more privileged peers. According to Patrick Halladay, director of education quality at the agency, about two-thirds of schools qualified.
But given how intractable the achievement gap has proven to be, in Vermont as everywhere else in the country, Halladay said that’s far from shocking.
“It’s not something to celebrate. But it’s not a surprise,” he said. “In most cases, the schools who aren’t eligible for equity supports, it’s because their student population is too small for it to be included in those accountability determinations.”
Like many education officials, Vermont Principals Association executive director Jay Nichols doesn’t mince words when he talks about NCLB, which he argues used overly-simplistic, reductive measures to rank and shame schools. Nichols echoed common critiques of the law, arguing a focus on top-line proficiency set an arbitrary standard that didn’t take into account the progress students made over time, or how far behind students were when they enrolled in school in the first place.
“It made no sense at all. But they were very successful at hammering public education and public school teachers with that law,” he said.
With the Snapshot’s more comprehensive measures, Nichols thinks Vermont is “headed in the right direction.”
Still, Nichols thinks there’s some value in even some of the more controversial holdovers in ESSA from NCLB. States, for example, still have to identify the lowest-performing schools, based on test scores and graduation rates, within their borders. In Vermont, those fifteen “Comprehensive Support” schools were publicly identified Thursday. Those schools will keep those labels for three years, but also get extra federal funding between $80,000 and $600,000 (depending on their size), as well as additional support from agency staff.
“You take it as an opportunity, and not a knock on your schools,” Nichols said.
