Is This What Full Accreditation Looks Like?

On Tuesday morning, the Missouri Board of Education voted unanimously to grant full accreditation to the St. Louis Public School district (SLPS). While there were applause and pats on the back for SLPS administrators, a closer look at the data raises questions about whether fully accrediting the district is appropriate.

The proponents of upgrading SLPS pointed to the district’s sustained score of over 70% on the Annual Performance Review (APR), along with more stable leadership, as evidence supporting accreditation.

Indeed, SLPS has improved in recent years; but does its progress warrant the state’s seal of approval? If we look at APR scores alone, we might think it does:

Here’s the problem: with the transition from provisionally accredited to fully accredited status, we would expect substantial improvements in the academic performance of the district’s students. But a look at the next table suggests that in 2016, scoring 100% in the attendance and graduation rate categories made up for poor scores in academic and subgroup achievement.  Here is the full table:

Moreover, peculiarities in the formula that takes the raw data and puts it into a point system allows for districts to achieve scores that are disproportionally high compared to their actual improvements. In the following set of tables, you can see how SLPS has made, at best, modest progress in the five areas that are scored.

In the academic achievement category, the district falls far below the state’s goals. When you examine the data behind the achievement scores, the picture looks even worse. Below are the results of the Missouri Assessment Program (MAP) tests for SLPS for the past 3 years:

Despite the big increase between 2014 and 2015 in APR scores, there was little improvement in students’ test performance—let alone in other important areas. The following table includes SLPS’s graduation rates, attendance rates, and ACT scores over the last four years.

SLPS’s recent performance is a mixed bag: attendance is close to the goal of 90% of students attending 90% of the time. The graduation rate and the percentage of students taking the ACT are also up, but these students still score very low on the ACT and are unlikely to be prepared for college.

SLPS has made headway in the last 10 years, and it deserves credit for doing so. But we’re still talking about a school district in which just over one-third of students score proficient or advanced in English, and just over one-quarter do so in math. Is that what we accept as sufficient? If we want to improve the quality of education in our state, shouldn’t Missourians set the bar higher?