Choice. It’s a sacred word in our society. We demand the right to choose for ourselves and education is no different. We demand the right to choose our own education, as well as that of our children. In business, choice can be a very good thing, spurring competition and innovation. I believe that it can be used in a limited way to encourage the same type of innovation within education.

However, this improvement only occurs as long as those making choices are informed about the quality of those choices.

Sadly, this is the opposite of the reality faced by parents in Shelby County. School choice has exploded into our community, but too many parents remain in the dark about the quality of those choices. All this set against the backdrop of a community that continues its inexorable march towards a portfolio model of education which replaces the traditional one school district with a combination of several different types of schools including charters, the ASD, iZone and others.

As we continue to offer choices, we cannot perpetuate the status quo that leaves parents ill-informed about the quality of options available to them and their children.

It’s time to adopt a universal report card here in Shelby County that allows parents to compare all the schools in our community side by side. This would empower parents to truly make an informed choice about the quality of education their children receive.

Background

First, how has school choice developed in Memphis? To answer that we need to start fifteen years ago. In 1999, we were one urban school system serving over a hundred thousand students. No charters, no ASD, no county merger. Feeder patterns were established, and every family sent their student to their neighborhood school. The only choice that was available was by enrolling students in private schools, by enrolling students in an “optional” (honors) program or by moving to a different neighborhood or suburban district.

Fast forward to 2014. We now have 41 charter schools operating in Memphis as of 2014-15. These schools collectively perform well, but individually are of varying quality. These schools serve over 12,000 students.

Another new development is the Achievement School District (ASD). The ASD now teaches over 6,500 students directly through its own schools, or indirectly through charter schools.

We’ve even seen innovation within Shelby county schools as the district works to expand the iZone, a set of schools within the district that allow administrators more freedom with hiring, firing and in school policies. Several other plans to expand choice continue to wait in the wings, notably a voucher system that would allow students to attend private schools on public money.

Given all this, parents would seemingly have every choice available at their fingertips and every opportunity to select the best quality school for their children.

Choice and Competition

Why the change? Why so many options? This all rests on the notion of school choice and competition. School choice is the idea that choice between schools will create competition, which will in turn stimulate innovation within those schools and ultimately, improvement in all schools.

I’m not going to engage in a debate in this piece about whether or not this is a good assumption or not (full disclosure: I think school choice can spur innovation and growth).

My goal here is to point out a simple fact; that our community is woefully uninformed about the quality of choice options within their community. There is no central system processing this information and informing students about the quality of their choices. Without that information, there’s simply no way that the improvement sought by choice advocates will come about. If parents don’t know the quality of the choice they are making, there’s no way that the goals of choice advocates will come to pass.

Its time to fix this. We need to adopt a universal rating system, a report card if you will, that ranks all schools side by side  to allow parents to see and rank the quality of schools available to their children.

The Goals

If we’re going to do school choice right, I think we need to have two goals in any school report card program that we adopt. First, it very clearly needs to offer detailed information on the academic performance of a school. Education is first and foremost about outcomes. Parents should be able to see the extent of which children are learning in any given school.

Second, it should offer comparative information on other qualitative measures of student outcomes. School isn’t just about academics. Things such as sports, extracurriculars, and neighborhood opportunities also matter, as do special education and other services such as ESL. Parents shouldn’t have to go hunting for this information. It should be available right at their fingertips.

Report Card Focus Areas

When designing a comprehensive school report card for Shelby County, I would advocate for three key areas on which to rate all schools; 1) School Climate and Culture, 2) Academic Achievement, and 3) Special Programs. Within those categories, I think we should also include several other sub categories, broken down in the manner that I’ve outlined below:

Focus Area One: School climate and culture – this category tells parents fundamentally about what type of environment they are sending their students into. A sort of background before getting to academics. In order to understand this, a report card should offer information on the following areas:

• Safety – Every parent wants to make sure that they are sending their child to a safe environment. Questions to answer: how safe is the school? How frequently do fights happen? Expulsions? Dangerous incidents? How about safety near the school? Is the neighborhood safe? What systems does the school have in place to make this happen?
• Faculty Quality – A large part of academic quality is the quality of the staff. Questions to answer here: What is the quality of faculty at the school? Are they highly qualified? How many years of experience do they have? How long have they been at this particular school? What is the typical rate of teacher turnover, and can students expect teachers to be there until they graduate?
• Parent/teacher and student satisfaction – How parents and students feel about a school is very important. Do students feel safe? Do they feel a part of a broader community? What about parents? How do they perceive the school? Are they included in the school community, or are they shut out?
• Student body profile – Parents also want to know who will be attending school alongside their students. Is the student body racially diverse? How about socio-economically? Where do most students come from, the community or elsewhere?

Focus Area Two: Academic Achievement – Academic achievement speaks to the quality of outcomes achieved by the school.

• Proficiency – Every parent deserves to know how their child’ school is doing when it comes to straight up proficiency rates. These don’t tell the whole story of the school, but they matter. What are their overall proficiency rates? How have they changed over time?
• Growth (3 year average) – Alongside proficiency, parents also deserve to know the growth rates over time for students in their student’s prospective school. However, to give a fair assessment this number should include three year growth averages to account for any anomalies that may happen in a single year
• Graduation rate (for high school) – Important for high schools, what percentage of students from a given school actually graduate from that school? This number doesn’t tell the whole story, but it tells an important one.
• College acceptance (for high school) – This is very important for college-minded parents. What percentage of high school graduates go on to a higher education degree? This could be self-reported from a survey of intention at the end of a school year, or could be part of a larger tracking program started by the district.

Focus Area Three: Special programs – this area would describe the programs offered by the school outside of traditional academics,and the quality of those programs.

• Honors/optional programs – does the school offer an optional program? How about an embedded honors program? Parents should have this knowledge at their fingertips
• AP/IB programs – parents not only need to know the number of AP and IB classes, but also the performance of students in those classes. A school may offer AP Calculus, but how many students have actually passed the exams in years past? This information is crucial for parents looking to prepare their students for college.
• SPED/ESL – does the school have an ESL program? How about the SPED program? What is the student/teacher ratio in these programs?
• Extracurriculars – What extra-curricular programs are offered at the school speaks volumes to the importance of that school.  For example, does the school have a debate team? If so, how many students participated last year? Did they win any awards? How about football? How many games did they win? Who is the coach and what is their contact information?  These are all important facts that allow parents to make an informed choice about which school will best serve the interests as well as the academics of their children.

Bottom line: if we truly want to empower parents to make a choice about their child’s schooling, we need to provide them with the information. I truly believe that a report card following the parameters above would accomplish this goal. This would require buy ins from all the schools under consideration (ASD, district and charters) which would be a difficult sell to some schools, especially lower performers. But if other communities such as DC and New York can do it, and so can Memphis.

updated 10/30, 8:53 AM: It’s come to my attention that I didn’t do the best job in the first iteration of this piece in articulating a vision for what this could look like. I also I left out the fact that the state of Tennessee creates their own report card on schools where you can look at individual achievement data. This is useful to parents in a limited sense, but only as far as academic data. I want something that provides more detail and also provides easy to compare rankings. When it comes to extracurricular programs, teacher experience and turnover, parents still need more data than the TN Report Card provides.

What I’m looking for is something similar to what DC publishes on its charter schools every year. You can access the how to read PDF here or the online document from 2012 here to get a better picture of what this could look like.

New York also does something similar, which can be accessed here (NY Report Card). I personally like the DC one better because it comes complete with a comparison list that can be utilized by parents for a quick and easy comparison (you can see an example on the DC report card on pages 10 and 11). Its not perfect, but its a good start to giving parents all the information they would need.

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