Data driven decision making- The Big Whoops

Two Superintendents improving education
by: mmccabe4724

A sophisticated decision: MCPS creates record SAT scores

The message in 2009 was much more sophisticated than in 2003.  This time, principals would not be asked how they could decrease participation on the SAT in order to raise the averages.  This time, MCPS would just ask a simple question:  "which test is best for you?"      It was so benign, yet so brilliant.   Have a meeting with the administration of every high school, and ask them to communicate to parents and students that they had a choice:  take the ACT or the SAT.   Just use criteria like the one below to help students make their decision:SAT ACT Comparison Checklist

Nothing to it.  This SAT/ACT action plan would then be "customized to meet the needs of individual schools."

Clarksburg High School created a page.

Walter Johnson had a page.

Northwood did this.

Damascus High School made a Power Point.

The plan was perfect.  In 2010, twenty-four of twenty five high schools in Montgomery County saw their percentage of SAT test takers drop.  Participation dropped, average scores rose, and Dr. Weast could continue to promote the MCPS brand name while building his consulting career in- get this- helping other districts use data to increase student achievement.

Want to know what is wrong with our educational system?   Folks- MCPS is a national model for its use of data.   But no one cares about what the data is designed to measure.   We just care about moving the data- which is no way to run an educational system.

The Montgomery County Public Schools' Fudge Factor: Record SAT scores

Fudging data is now the culture of schools across the United States.   It is not a conspiracy theory.  It is the way that districts and the principals within those districts that "honor" the data, attempt to make themselves look great.   And as a general rule of thumb, the better the"fudger," the greater the reputation that accompanies it.  Let's just take former superintendent of Montgomery County Public Schools, Jerry Weast, for example, the man Jay Matthews once called one of the top ten superintendents in the country.  In 2010, the year he retired, he claimed as one of his top ten achievements as a superintendent, record SAT scores.   Of course, these SAT scores were accompanied by record drops in SAT participation.   Think this was just  an accident?   Or could this be a similar but more sophisticated version of what occurred in 2003, when a Montgomery County Public School's newspaper, Blair High School's SilverChips, reported that principals were actually told by Weast to contrive their SAT scores through participation rates:

At an Oct 2 meeting with high school principals, Weast suggested, according to Principal Phillip Gainous,that students who could not help out SAT scores [for MCPS] and were not ready to take the SATs should be discouraged from taking them," said Gainous.  

Both Principal Daniel Shea of Quince Orchard High School and Principal Michael Durso of Springbrook High School corroborated this statement. According to Shea, Weast wanted schools to *examine the level of students taking the SATs to appropriately limit exposure." The superintendent*s message was clear, said Gainous: *We were told to do it. And the expectation was that we would all go back and do it. 

Elimination of low-scoring students from the general test-taking pool will automatically boost average SAT scores, explained Durso. If we have a certain number of students not take the SATs, then we*ll be on Sixty Minutes because of our [high] scores," he claimed.  

"It's morally wrong. It's illegal," said Blair PTSA President Valerie Ervin, who works for the County Council, regarding Weast*s suggestion.

In 2010, the media picked up the the story and touted  Montgomery County's record, just the way Jerry Weast knew they would. But perhaps the record was not quite what it appeared to be on first glance.   Perhaps we were closer to what Valerie Ervin concluded- something morally wrong.

Different takes on the SAT

MCPS celebrated rising average SAT scores, issuing this press release a few days back.   However, a precipitous drop in participation  during the 2010 school year has some questioning the conclusions that should be drawn from the data.   Lisa Gartner of the Washington Examiner has an interesting take.

The school district saw a 38-point jump in SAT scores this year, with the biggest gains among African-American and Hispanic students. But participation overall dropped about 8.5 percent, with a 15.6 percent drop in participation among blacks and 17.7 percent among Hispanics, groups who traditionally do not perform as well on tests.

One would expect high SAT averages to be accompanied by increasing numbers of students earning a college ready score of 1650.  Curiously, the number of students who have received college ready scores in MCPS has remained flat over the last several years despite a small rise in the number of graduates over those same years.

Data from: http://www.montgomeryschoolsmd.org/info/pdf/Class2010SAT-MCPS-MD-Nation-9-13-10-final.pdf