Web watchdog sniffs out SOL quirk

The Virginian-Pilot

OW-W-W-O-O-O.

That’s the Daily Howler, snout pointed toward the moon, alerting the Web-surfing public that something is amiss at the Virginia Department of Education.

Maybe.

I don’t know Bob Somerby, the man behind the howl, but I do know that his persistent needling made something of a splash in state education circles last week.

Here’s what I’d learned about the former Baltimore teacher (via Harvard and a roommate named Al Gore), turned comedian, turned Maryland-based media critic by week’s end:

No. 1: Deign to ask a Web-site sleuth a question and you’re fair game to show up as his next day’s headline.

No. 2: A howler doesn’t need proof to start baying. Intimations of chicanery pop up liberally on the dailyhowler.com. In Somerby’s view, only patsies would accept the Ed Department’s claim that technical difficulties shut down the “school report card” section of its Web site last week. Count me in.

No. 3: Somerby cares enough about the children of Virginia to have spent hours dissecting complicated accreditation data that are not for the faint-hearted, which endears him to me despite Nos. 1 and 2. Prone to motion sickness, I was literally nauseous last week by the time I’d scrolled up and down the computer screen for a couple of hours checking out his arguments.

Unless Somerby is a genius, he’d spent a lot more time than that figuring what all the numbers meant. Would that more Virginians cared as much.

What he’s discovered about the way Virginia calculates school accreditation ratings ought to be far more broadly understood. Whether it signals “fraud” and “total nonsense,” as Somerby concludes, or a determined effort to combat entrenched failure, as the Department of Education insists, will inevitably lie in the eye of the beholder.

Here’s what my eye beholds:

Some long-ignored Virginia schoolchildren are progressing. However that happened, it’s worth applauding. Second, whether for good or ill, data are easily manipulated. To me, that’s a sound reason to keep the imperfect No-Child-Left-Behind watchdog focused on Virginia’s school reform efforts.

And third, even with some “generous” (substitute “fraudulent” if you’re Somerby) massaging, about 8 percent of Virginia schools haven’t managed to meet accreditation standards. That’s a powerful argument for shutting them down when accreditation gets serious later this year.

The object of Somerby’s scorn is a policy known as Remediation Recovery. The Board of Education has made no secret of this practice, but it’s fair to say that officials didn’t go out of their way to trumpet exactly how it works.

In shorthand, if a child fails a third-grade Standards of Learning reading test, he gets to take the test again. If he passes, the score boosts the school’s pass rate. Fair enough.

Now, the less-understood part: Typically, the retest occurs in the spring of the following year, when the child is a fourth-grader. If the child passes, the school gets to count the improved score in the current year’s third-grade pass rate. The fourth-grader can, in effect, help offset the score of a failing third-grader.

Here’s how that played out at the Alexandria elementary school that first got Somerby’s attention. Maury Elementary had a “school accreditation rating” of 92 percent in language arts last year. But when Somerby looked further down in the data on the state Web site, he saw that only 27 percent of the school’s third-graders passed the test.

How could that be? Part of the answer is that the fifth-graders did a lot better than the third-graders. Another big part is Remediation Recovery.

When Maury’s 19 third-graders took the test last spring, five passed and 14 didn’t. Meanwhile, a group of fourth-graders who’d failed the previous year got to take the test again. Twelve of them passed. Their scores got lumped into the current year’s third-grade pool. Voilà, a much higher pass rate.

“Utterly ludicrous,” says Somerby.

I agree, but ...

Listen to the other side.

The crux of the counterargument is that the schools where this made a difference are some of the toughest educational challenges in Virginia. If those schools were able to rescue a child who couldn’t read, even if a year late, that’s cause for celebration. Giving such schools credit for remedial success has been a critical incentive for them to keep trying.

Two factors worth weighing: The huge gap between the third-grade pass rate and the accreditation score at Maury appears to be an anomaly. I checked out several schools in Richmond and Norfolk. Far more typical was Bowling Park Elementary in Norfolk, which had an accreditation score of 87 percent in English and pass rates of 74 percent in third grade and 76 percent in fifth grade.

Bowling Park would have qualified for accreditation in English with or without the added scores.

Second, the practice is slated to change this spring. Fourth-grade success will still be reflected in third-grade scores, but the extra participants will be counted in the denominator as well as the numerator of the calculation. We’ll know by the end of the summer whether that brings about a big dip in accreditation ratings in challenged school divisions.

After almost a decade of education reform, Virginia is approaching an era when it must apply serious consequences to failing schools — or consider the effort itself failed.

As the Daily Howler illuminates, Virginia has bent over backward to encourage success. Now, it’s time to zero in on the worst of the worst.

Margaret Edds is an editorial writer for The Virginian-Pilot. E-mail her at margaret.edds@pilotonline.com