SALT LAKE CITY ? Utah lawmakers were enthused Wednesday by a new data portal that allows parents to compare their child's school with other schools in the state on standardized test performances.
The Public School Data Gateway, six years in the making, uses data from public schools statewide and allows users to compare the percent of students who test proficiently on annual Criterion Reference Tests to the proficiency rates at other schools.
"This has been, I think, 6 or 7 years in coming and I'm so happy I could almost cry," said Sen. Howard Stephenson, R-Draper. "Thank you, thank you, thank you. ? Now we have the general ranking of schools for all measurable components."
Users can make comparisons among schools with similar demographics, those in the same area, those in the same district or among schools statewide in addition to other variables, according to John Jesse, director of assessment and accountability at the State Office of Education.
A slick interface makes it easy for users to compare a school's proficiency in math, language arts and science to other schools based on a variety of factors. Users can make comparisons among schools with similar demographics, those in the same area, those in the same district or among schools statewide in addition to other variables, according to John Jesse, director of assessment and accountability at the State Office of Education. Users can even see a complete ranking of all the state's more than 1,000 schools in terms of test score proficiency.
The raw data was available online in the past, "but not in a real accessible, transparent form," Jesse said. "Now you've got it nice and organized and you can just call up anything you like."
"I think we are cutting edge and I think this is fantastic," said Sen. Wayne Niederhauser, R-Sandy. Niederhauser's school grading legislation, that will assign schools an A, B, C, D or F based on performance in a number of areas, will eventually be incorporated into the new system.
Some lawmakers on the Education Interim Committee expressed concern that parents might interpret the test proficiency score for a single subject as a telltale sign that the school is a bad school. Tested subjects are just part of a rich curriculum, said Rep. Marie Poulson, D-Cottonwood Heights.
"How are you quantifying schools that have a number of curriculum options that other schools don't have," Poulson asked. "There are so many things that we cannot measure with test scores."
Jesse said that is particularly true in junior high and high schools where there is less usable data than elementary schools. That's because students in elementary schools across the state offer the same curriculum while secondary schools, particularly large high schools, are able to offer a variety of electives.
Judy Park, state associate superintendent for student services and federal programs, said educators want to make it very clear that the test scores aren't indicative of a school's overall quality, but rather how well students perform on narrow, once-a-year tests.
This isn't about ranking schools, this is about ranking their performance on a particular assessment.
?Judy Park, state assistant superintendent
"This isn't about ranking schools, this is about ranking their performance on a particular assessment," Park said.
"You're looking at a specific test. It's not a school ranking per se."
Jesse said educators are concerned that parents might misinterpret the data or make unfair judgments about certain schools because of the data.
"It is one of the risks that you take when you display data like this," he said. "But we'll try to explain to the public and try to communicate through the website what they're looking at."
Rep. Johnny Anderson, R-Taylorsville, said it would be more fair to combine the test results with data on parent participation, so the full accountability for poor performance isn't placed solely on the school. That additional data could include things like attendance rates for parent teacher conferences and the number of volunteer hours parents put in at schools.
Without that kind of information, "it's not going to provide them that whole picture," Anderson said.
State Superintendent Larry Shumway said there are a lot of interesting data schools could collect, but lawmakers need to be careful when it comes to collecting information from schools. In order for it to be useful, it needs to be accurate and reliable, and that can be extremely taxing.
"It's a significant burden on schools to collect this data" with a price tag of $10 million.
"Data aren't free. ? What you're seeing here is a display of millions of dollars worth of data," he said, referring to the costs associated with developing, administering and collecting test assessment data from every school in the state. "As we think of all the things that we might want to know ? there are burdens on our system to collect that."
Email:mfarmer@ksl.com
Source: http://www.ksl.com/?nid=960&sid=17342959&s_cid=rss-960
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