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Colorado should start considering the career and college prep that students take, stop counting at-risk students more than once, and expand testing in other languages for annual school and district ratings.
Those are among the 30 recommendations made by the 1241 task force, a group created by lawmakers in 2023 to examine the state’s accountability system.
The recommendations were presented to the State Board of Education on Wednesday. Some of the recommendations will require a board vote to implement, while others would require legislative action.
State Board members Wednesday asked some questions about the recommendations, but were asked by the Education Commissioner, Susana Cordova, to hold most of their thoughts for a discussion at their December meeting. Most board members said the recommendations seemed like good changes, although at times, they wondered if some would require a lot more research to implement.
For example, one recommendation is that the state should work to expand testing options in other languages. State Board members questioned if testing students in their native language makes sense when they aren’t being taught in that language or if their year’s learning is better assessed in English, the language of their instruction.
The state’s school accountability system, in use since 2009, mostly uses standardized test scores to rate schools and districts. High schools are also rated on their graduation rates and on how many students move on to postsecondary options.
Schools can earn one of four ratings, while districts can earn one of five. State law dictates that schools or districts that earn one of the bottom two ratings for five years in a row must be placed on a plan for improvement under state orders. The state is also limited in what improvements it can order, but can escalate to closing a school, turning it into a charter school, or ordering a district to reorganize.
Last year, Adams 14, which has had the lowest ratings for more than 10 years, was ordered to reorganize. That could have meant dissolving or merging parts of the district with neighboring districts, but after strong pushback from the community, the state backed off its orders.
The majority of schools and districts first identified for support based on low ratings do manage to improve before needing state intervention.
An audit completed in December 2022 found that the state’s system is reasonable, but also that schools serving more students of color and students in poverty on average do worse on state tests.
Some questions critics of the system hoped to answer, such as whether the system itself is helping or harming student learning or is biased against more disadvantaged students, were not addressed.
School district leaders pushed legislators to create the 1241 task force to consider broader changes to the system.
The task force of 26 school and district leaders, parents, advocates, and other educators have met for more than a year to consider the recommendations.
The report, however, states that the group “strongly believes the accountability system alone cannot advance academic opportunities or prevent academic inequities.”
Still, some of the recommendations are designed to limit inequities around schools that serve more disadvantaged students or schools with such small numbers of students that their ratings can be volatile from year to year.
Report explains findings, recommendations, areas to study
In addition to recommendations, the group’s report also points to several areas of the system that require more study for possible changes.
For instance, the group suggests that the state’s review panel (a group that goes into schools and districts to make recommendations when the State Board must order an improvement plan) should perhaps be asked to evaluate factors beyond academics. That would include looking at a school or district’s budget, governance, and facilities and then recommending how the district might focus on improving those areas, including being able to recommend a change in leadership.
Here are some of the task force’s recommendations:
- Students who fall into subgroups such as students with disabilities, English learners, or those who qualify for free and reduced price lunch should be combined into one “super subgroup,” so schools are only evaluated for them once.
- The state should consider lowering the number of students needed in a group for the state to report data, as opposed to suppressing it for privacy purposes. Currently that number is 16. The recommendation doesn’t state a better lower number but asks the state to study what would be appropriate.
- Students with disabilities should continue to be counted in that group for two years after no longer needing services, aligning with how students learning English are followed after services are no longer provided.
- The state should revisit the weights it gives to each piece considered in these ratings every five years, with help of experts, to try to move away from having strong correlations to student demographics.
- Individual student results should be made available to families as soon as possible, even before a public release of data. The state should also try to speed up the time it takes educators to get results.
- The rating labels schools and districts earn should be changed to be easier for the public to understand, but that should be done after research and gathering public feedback.
- Schools should have more state support when they reach two years of low ratings, or being “on the clock,” to provide more early interventions before they are subject to state mandates in year five.
- The state should “design budgetary expectations” for school turnaround and plan to sustain bold plans for improvement once funding is exhausted.
- Schools and districts that have low test participation and can’t be rated getting only “Insufficient data: Low Participation” labels, should create a corrective action plan submitted to the state.
- The legislature should require schools and districts under state-ordered improvement plans to meet with, learn from, and share their progress with each other.
- The State Board of Education should delegate authority to allow state officials to approve small changes to state ordered improvement plans allowing flexibility when conditions change.
Read the full report and all of the recommendations here.
Yesenia Robles is a reporter for Chalkbeat Colorado covering K-12 school districts and multilingual education. Contact Yesenia at yrobles@chalkbeat.org.