What Matters? By Sean Rickert, Superintendent Pima USD, ARSA Executive Board Educational leaders serve at the behest of countless agendas. The last year has only added to the fray and made it harder to keep your eye focused on the vision of the best way to guide your district, school or department towards successfully implementing its vision. Sometimes it is helpful to consider some empirical evidence showing what really matters. Most of the factors that guide decision making are subjective, and that isn’t always a bad thing. It can be refreshing to step back and look at things through a fresh set of lenses based on objective criteria. For the base three years I have served as an appointee of the Arizona State Board of Education on the Accountability Technical Advisory Committee managed by the Arizona Department of Education. My interest in accountability goes back to a discovery made a decade ago when reviewing the locations of “A” rated schools in Arizona. While almost half of the state’s schools are in the rural counties, fewer than a tenth of the “A” high schools were in those communities. It appeared there was some bias in the way we measure schools. I began to wade through the morass of noise about what makes a good school. If we don’t know which factors we should try to influence, how can we move forward? Luckily, we have a voluminous data set of factors generally associated with school quality ripe for utilization in comparing performance on independent variables to see how performance on x affects y. I am not referring to the A-F accountability Teacher Experience (A) Average Years of Teacher Experiene Percentage of Teachers In First 3 Years Student Spending (B) Per Pupil Instruction Spending Student Support Spending Instruction Support Spending Total Operational Spending system. Almost everything counted in a school’s letter grade goes back to student performance on the state’s standardized test. To say that schools are doing well because they do well on a test seems … circular. I wanted to figure out what factors are correlated with success. The Arizona Auditor General provides an annual report on each school district in the state based on 137 characteristics of public schools.1 These reports are useful for helping communities and boards understand the how their district is performing relative to other districts. The data is also reported as a spreadsheet, which means it can be used to develop a picture of the education system as a whole. With 137 characteristics for each of the 212 school districts in hand it becomes possible to start looking for what really matters. The first question is what an indicator of quality performance? As I mentioned, there is a high level of agreement that student achievement measured by standardized test scores is a robust indicator of school quality. If it isn’t, we should seriously reconsider our accountability system. There are a number of districts who do not have test score data on the Auditor General’s report due to small n-size and technical issues. Since performance on the math and English language arts test are our dependent variables, those small districts were removed. This leaves us with 185 districts. Next, it seemed that 137 characteristics was too much to wrestle with, so seventeen key factors in five categories were identified. Operational Spending (C) Per Pupil Administration Spending Plant Operations Food Service Transportation 1No such report is generated for the states 700 plus public charter schools. Page 3 Teacher Spending/ Class Size (D) Average Teacher Salary Amount from Prop 301 Students Per Teacher Student Population Characteristics (E) Special Education Population English Learner Population Poverty Rate Free/Reduced Price Price Meal Eligibility (continued on page 5) “Stronger Together!”
4 Publizr Home