SC Runaway Leader In Rotten US Schools

By baker on March 11th, 2009 at 3:32 pm

A couple things about all this:

(1) There may be some mightily struggling schools on this list. But it’s funny and, I imagine, of little value to most people actually considering the purchase of a home.

**First of all, they include the Dorman 9th Grade Campus. While I’m not entirely sold on the ninth grade “academy” concept, the Dorman program has a pretty solid reputation in Spartanburg. And good grief — people surely have been moving in droves to District 6 in Spartanburg, where Dorman is located. I think the idea that that school is one of the worst 100 in the USA seems preposterous, and my guess is that if the people with the “patent pending” survey methodology actually talked to real realtors, they would find out that Dorman’s ninth grade school isn’t a negative for selling homes.

**Many of the schools on the list appear to be magnet schools or charter schools (Gov. Mark Sanford wants to make it easier to start charter schools, right?) that likely INTEND to serve struggling students and are, therefore, likely to have low-ish test scores. The Phoenix Center and Choices Academy or whatever in South Carolina are charter schools on the list.

**Because charter and magnet and alternative schools generally serve an entire community and not just a certain neighborhood, their “quality” often doesn’t have much bearing on home-buying choices. In other words, does the fact that a charter school serving tough kids from all around Charleston County has low test scores mean that every neighborhood in Charleston is suspect? Of course not. And since the school isn’t neighborhood-specific, it doesn’t have any bearing on purchasing a home in any particular section of town, either.

(2) Will, You once again put forth misleading information based on (I assume deliberately) misleading methodology. You cut the NEWSWEEK report off at 350 schools, but there were actually 1,300 recognized by Newsweek. Here’s how one of your readers clarified your poor reporting from the link you provided today:

“Nice choice of statistics. Although I’m not one to claim SC has all-around great public schools, I’ll still give credit where it’s due. The fact of the matter is, depending on where you live (a choice) there are some excellent options in proportion to the rest of the country.

SC had 19 of the 1,300 on the list for a whopping 1.462%.

Still looks pretty bad, until you have something to put it into perspective. According to the US Census Bureau, SC makes up a whopping 1.443% of the nation’s population.”

By Gococksri on March 11th, 2009 at 3:50 pm

Gillon questions the validity of the entire survey and I agree with his reasoning. I question the validity of your publishing a survey or list such as this without also publishing the methodology used to rank the schools that appear on the list. Furthermore, there is no clear line between the schools listed and the conclusions you draw from their being listed. I could draw conclusions diametrically opposed to yours from the same information. I don’t because the issue isn’t as simple as you want to make it. The variables are too many for a knee-jerk assessment of what these rankings mean and you serve no one when your knee starts jerking. I never know if your knee is jerking or shaking.

By baker on March 11th, 2009 at 5:26 pm

So far we’ve got on the list:

1. a school that maybe doesn’t exist anymore
2. a school in Spartanburg that I think clearly isn’t a “worst school”
3. a bunch of charter and magnet schools that are “choice” locations and therefore wouldn’t help people “find information on the neighborhoods they are moving into.”
4. Will Folks re-submitting misleading data regarding an old Newsweek survey

Of course, Gococksri, I’m sure you realize that “validity” isn’t really the issue in any of this. For Will and his “friends over at the Voice” (SCRG) it’s all a matter of propaganda.

By fitsnews on March 11th, 2009 at 6:07 pm

OBD,

Damn dude … we’re the ones on edge?

We will roll correct in Estill or wherever we want.

And the ghost of ODB rolls with us.

-Fizzle

By Old Bike Dude on March 11th, 2009 at 9:18 pm

Damn scraight!
Peace out.

By Its about time on March 11th, 2009 at 10:40 pm

Keep defending the SC public school Baker. As long as your child isn’t in one of the 38 of the worst 100 schools I’m sure your top priority is to keep the status quo.

Also, where you live isn’t a “choice” for everyone. If you can’t afford to buy a home in an upper-class neighborhood you don’t get to attend that school. This is the ultimate in discrimination.

Give people a real choice.

By baker on March 12th, 2009 at 9:00 am

It’s About Time — Your point about neighborhoods is a valid one. That’s why Jim Rex pushed for a choice plan that would allow transfers into public schools outside of one’s neighborhood zone.

What I was pointing out about this list is that it appears that many of the schools identified have nothing to do with neighborhood selection….again, because they’re charters or magnets or alternative schools.

By Andrew on March 12th, 2009 at 1:37 pm

When any study is conducted to compare and rate schools, the methodology is key. The findings reported here use each school’s own No Child Left Behind test scores, but standardized by Neighborhood Scout’s patent-pending methodology for national comparison that also takes into account the NAEP as a standarizing measure.

It is well known that the quality of education provided by public schools varies greatly across the country. Still further, the quality of a child’s education can vary significantly from school district to school district within a state and can even be widely varied between two different schools within the same school district.

In an attempt to quantify student performance and to improve the performance of elementary and secondary schools across America, the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act was signed into law in January of 2002. The NCLB has earmarked billions of dollars that are directed to nationwide educational reform and improvement. Under NCLB each state receives federal dollars for its public and charter schools based on the performance of their schools. One of the main mechanisms for assessing performance is through testing and test scores. As a result, schools have begun placing far more of an emphasis on preparing students for these NCLB standardized tests.

While theoretically, the concept of a national NCLB standardized test should provide a milestone by which to compare the performance of all of the schools in the country relative to one another, the actual test is not truly standardized. This is because while the federal government passed down guidelines and standards for the creation of a testing mechanism, the states themselves were left to develop, implement and administer the actual NCLB tests. As a result, despite the federal guidelines and standards, there is still a wide variation in the difficulty and content of the actual tests that have been implemented from state to state. Therefore any school comparison system that employs strictly the NCLB results as a basis for comparison is likely skewed due to the widespread differences in the underlying tests.

Accordingly, there is a need for a method and system that provides normalization of the performance data for all schools across the nation, and which can provide a meaningful basis for comparison of school performance on a national basis.

NeighborhoodScout has invented a patent-pending method and system to directly compare school districts and individual schools across state lines based on their reported NCLB test scores, even though the tests are entirely different in each state.

The methodology operates on the basis that all students attending public elementary and secondary schools must take the NCLB offered within their state. While the NCLB test results can provide a meaningful comparison between any students and schools that were administered the same test, since the tests are different state-to-state, a comparison on this basis is generally inaccurate and unreliable. To normalize the NCLB test results based on the differences, Scout’s methodology employs an additional factor that is employed as a modifier of the NCLB test results.

In addition to the NCLB testing, a population of randomly selected students in each state also takes the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) test. The NAEP test is the closest thing to a gold standard national test and it is administered in the same form to every student who takes the test. The difficulty in using this test as a basis for comparison on its own is that there are not enough students in any one school or school district that take the test to make it statistically significant for comparison. It is of note however that although the NAEP is the same in every location the results reported by the NAEP often differ significantly from the NCLB results for any given state.

For example, the average percentage of students who passed the NAEP in a recent year in Mississippi was 16% while in Massachusetts the pass rate was 45%, even though the test is the same. In contrast, Mississippi’s recent state-specific NCLB testing scores show that nearly 75% of their students were proficient or advanced, making it look like Mississippi has an outstanding public school system. The reality however is that Mississippi’s NCLB scores are high because their NCLB test is less challenging then the NAEP.

As a result neither of the available tests provides an ideal set of data for the comparison of schools on a nationwide basis. The NCLB is often skewed because of local test development bias and the NEAP is not administered on a widespread enough basis.

NeighborhoodScout’s method takes the average percentage of students testing as proficient or advanced in reading and math on the NCLB state-specific test and subtracts the percentage of students in that same state who passed the NAEP, either in total or for these specific subjects. This subtraction produces a state-specific gap value that is then subtracted from each school and school district’s NCLB proficiency percentages. Once the NCLB results are adjusted, the schools and the school districts nationwide are then ranked relative to one another. As a result, the methodology provides a curve that brings all individual schools and every school district to a nationally comparable rating based on the NCLB testing results.

From this research, the 100 Worst Public Schools in America have been identified. They are found in twenty different states, some in inner city urban areas, and some in rural America. All schools included in the study were classified by the U.S. Department of Education as ‘regular secondary or elementary schools.’ Any school classified by the U.S. Department of Education as a ’special needs school’ was not included in this ranking. Charter schools and magnet schools were purposefully included, just as they were included in NeighborhoodScout’s ranking of the 100 best performing public schools in America. It is of note that many charter schools also make the list of the best performing schools in America. Because there is a movement towards more charter schools, rather than fewer, more American students are now enrolled in charter schools than ever before. We do not see this trend reversing in the near-term. Therefore, this population of American students was included in the study. All schools of all grades were included in the study.

All schools, regardless of the grade-levels served, have a charge of preparing their students for the next level, which is assessed by grade-appropriate testing, mandated by the federal government and developed and applied by the state department of education. Some schools do exceptionally well in preparing their students for the next step, and some do far less well. When NeighborhoodScout examined the schools using this yardstick of assessing how well the schools prepare their students for the next step, it ended up with a mix of elementary, middle, and high schools as worst performers across the nation.