BOE concerned with accreditation module

MONTE VISTA— Monte Vista School Board President Matt Nehring is not pleased with the current accreditation module used by the Colorado Department of Education (CDE). He believes the module negatively impacts school districts such as Monte Vista that serve communities with high minority populations and with a significant number of students that qualify for free and reduced lunches.
At the Thursday, Feb. 16 Monte Vista School Board meeting Nehring gave a special presentation to the rest of the board and the audience outlining research he has conducted that shows the adverse effects by CDE’s system. Nehring also reported he had contacted government and state educational leaders to discuss his concerns with varying levels of success.
After his contacts he was able to schedule a telephone conference with members of CDE. “I characterize the meeting as productive but very frustrating. After the phone call I think there was some progress made. I think there was a realization that the negative branding and labeling associated with the accountability system isn’t particularly effective,” said Nehring.
“I made the case that it’s not just affecting one school it’s affecting our entire district. More than that, it affects our community. We’ve been trying to build our schools and have somewhat of a reputation change and see that fewer and fewer students are headed out to Sargent. Slapping us with something like this, that in my argument is fairly arbitrary anyway, is not really fair,” he said.
Nehring stated he believes CDE is aware of how the module disproportionately discriminates against high poverty areas. Nehring used information publicly available on CDE’s website that shows how schools being scored low by the module are clustered in areas with high poverty and minority populations. “They clearly have been aware of this problem for quite some time. At some level I think they acknowledged this and told me in not so many words, ‘We’re really sorry about that.’”
The board president also discussed other items that were used in the accreditation measurement. He said CDE comes up with percentages of students that should be attending higher education institutions from districts. Nehring said he explained to CDE that if students are graduating from high poverty areas less of them are likely to have the opportunity to attend college.
To drive his point Nehring said that if data were to be used regarding how many students from a district were enrolling in the military then school standings might be flipped. He argued that many students who enlist in the armed forces come from these type of areas rather than from affluent and wealthy schools. “You can imagine those schools would be up in arms because using such a metric they would be failing because most of their students aren’t going to the military,” stated Nehring.
Nehring said he disagreed with these methods of calculating success. “That’s projecting their values on every school in the state. They’re basically telling students the only way to be successful is if they go on to some form of higher education. I don’t think that’s appropriate,” he said.
Nehring used the remainder of his presentation to show a mock up of CDE’s rating system. He plugged in information for hypothetical schools and seemed to prove that schools can be rated low based on their populations and that slight manipulations of the data might not do anything for a school’s performance rating even if they are showing signs of improvement and progress.
Nehring stated that he has a meeting scheduled with a representative of CDE in April. He plans to further discuss the issue and present his research.


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