School Report Cards

I was in my second month as a first year principal and the school received a School Report Card grade of D. This was shocking. I wanted to see if this score made sense considering other metrics. I wanted a way to present this to staff and to dispel the myths of school improvement.

Improvement myths wreck progress. It's easy to look out at all the problems outside of our control and consider them deterministic. It's harder to take a sober look at where your organization is and ask what is within our control to bring about change. SRG are not perfect but they are a good-enough indicator of how a school is doing compared to similar schools. We were falling short and it wasn't because we were more poor, or because the proficiency/growth equation hurt us. It wasn't because of our growth score. We had improvements to make and this dashboard helped us recognize that there was a problem and develop a sense of urgency.

I would fill in all the data patches and map this out across the state. This data is not easy to find or interact with. The state websites that explore this data are clunky and tell a particular story. Also, I used to complain about the growth/proficiency equation being 20%/80% of the SRG score. I learned that the equation changes the grade but not the relative position to other schools.