Washington State Public Schools (K-12) Achievement Awards – Real or Phony?

Each year the Washington State Superintendent of Schools announces the schools that have received what is deemed a “special” award of excellence.

Are these awards really for “excellence” or “improvement” and are they honest and meaningful. We decided to investigate.

The first thing you need to know is that if at least 95% of the students don’t participate in the SBAC (Common Core Standardized Test) then they can NOT receive an award no matter how well they score or rate. That tells us this is less about recognizing performance and all about patting the heads of those who toe the line.

But…let’s see what we can find when we look deeper.

Here is a link to a section of the OSPI website that contains the ratings used to determine who gets awards. This site covers the entire State of Washington so you can look up any school. Unfortunately they do not allow for a State wide view nor do they allow for a district view…only on a per school basis. https://eds.ospi.k12.wa.us/WAI/IndexReport/dropdown

How do you use the site?

1. Choose the year – the most recent year is 2015/2016
2. Choose the “ESD”. School districts are grouped together. An ESD is a support district. If you don’t know what yours is you’ll need to do some digging
3. Chose the school district
4. Choose the school
5. Review the data

How about we walk through and example?

Year: 2015/2016     ESD: 112     District: Battle Ground     School: Daybreak Primary

What do we see? There are three (3) tabs:

• The school got at least 95% participation in the SBAC (Common Core) Standardized Testing so the are eligible for an award if the scores are high enough
• The school doesn’t appear to be doing well. They are showing lower than average improvement

• The second tab shows that they are indeed underperforming and did not get any awards

To understand the scores you need to know what the scores mean:  As you can see, looking at the “All Students” the score is 5.00

Based on the table on the left we see that the school would have received a grade of “D”. What’s interesting is that OSPI rates TOP performance with a score of 78.3% or higher. In a real grading system in a class room we might see:

Grade “A” 90% – 100%

Grade “B” 80% – 89.9%

Grade “C” 70% – 79.9%

Grade “D” 60% – 69.9%

Grade “F” Below 60%

Hopefully that helps you understand the basic information.

Now…go take a look at your own school and district and see if you have questions for your district or OSPI…and let us know what you think.