The latest annual scores of Missouri schools’ quality are expected to be released in February. Gavuging a school’s progress will again not be a simple comparison to previous years’ scores, but officials with the state’s education department say those sorts of comparisons will be accurate in the future.
Kevin Freeman, director of school improvement for the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education, said Friday the Annual Performance Report scores for 2018 are expected to be released Feb. 1, but they will not be comparable to previous years.
“It’s a new test,” he said, given that new English and math assessments were implemented — which is also a reason for the delayed release of scores that have usually been released in November in recent years. It’s also a new test because status targets have been changed.
Status targets are the scales that judge how many points for status, progress and growth are earned in APR scores.
The APR is the yearly update on schools’ and districts’ progress under the Missouri School Improvement Plan — which is expected to transition from its fifth to sixth version over the next two or three school years.
Freeman said the status targets used for 2018 are planned to last until MSIP 6 is in place.
Schools’ and districts’ abilities to make year-to-year comparisons with the state’s APR data has been limited in recent years. Comparisons in the results of grade-level assessments in English and math have been comparable between 2016 and 2017, but not with 2014’s or 2015’s results.
Freeman said 2018 will be a new baseline year.
Chris Neale — the assistant commissioner for DESE’s Office of Quality Schools — used the analogy of track and field races to explain why status targets were moved.
Neale said using previous status targets for more rigorous APR assessments would be like judging the results of a 10,000-meter race by 1,500-meter race standards.
The use of the new targets will probably mean more schools will be shown as “on track” under the state’s improvement plan. A slide Freeman showed projected while only 5 percent of Missouri’s schools would have been classified as on track in students’ achievement in math by 2017’s targets, that would jump to 40 percent in this year’s results.
Likewise, 28 percent of districts would have scored in the lowest performance category in math — “floor” — with last year’s status targets, but that would shrink to 4 percent for 2018.
Freeman said DESE is also phasing out the “hold harmless” aspect of APR data for English and math, though, and hold harmless will be gone entirely by 2020 after a transition plan for this year and next is carried out. Hold harmless has let districts use a previous year’s points in calculating a score if they were higher than the current year’s points earned.
Freeman said 456 of the state’s districts in 2017 were using hold harmless to some degree. There are 518 public districts in the state.
There will also not be any science score data in the APR results for 2018 because a non-operational field test was used — and the same will happen with social studies next year.