The recent EdChoice designation for Kenwood Elementary, which allows students from purportedly “low performing” schools to attend private schools using taxpayer money, has caused some to assume Kenwood is providing a poor education, without looking at the details of the state report cards (https://reportcard.education.ohio.gov/school/overview/018887).
After careful examination and after communicating with the state office responsible for these report cards, I’ve come to the conclusion that a key reason for Kenwood’s designation as EdChoice, is the variability in incoming students from year to year, combined with Kenwood having a small number of students.
Why do I think this? Because currently Kenwood receives a “B” component grade for the progress of individual students, with an “A” for overall progress in English and Language Arts (ELA), Math, and Science. Moreover, Kenwood exceeds targets for performance in ELA and math for students with an “economic disadvantage.” But these statistics are all based on grades 3-5, whereas the EdChoice designation is based on grades K-3. When you look at details for each grade, you can see a lot of differences between cohorts, with some grades not doing as well and other grades performing very well. Thus, the state report card for Kenwood seems contradictory, with certain measures seeming to disagree with other measures.
How is this possible? Think about flipping a coin only five times. You might get heads all five times. But if you flipped that coin 100 times, you would probably get close to 50 heads and 50 tails. The same thing can happen in smaller schools with smaller numbers of students in each grade. Just by chance, a few extra students in one particular year might have more challenges than others, such as less support at home.
To be clear, the state designation of EdChoice for Kenwood is based on ~10-20 struggling readers per grade level in grades K-3. The school has recently only been able to get ~30% of these students to catch up on reading within one year, leaving 7-14 students, per grade level, still not meeting targets. This is problematic and indicates that the school likely needs to invest more resources in struggling readers for grades K-3. But the majority of students, 60-80%, are on-track with their reading and these students are not included in the EdChoice designation for Kenwood.
This analysis has left me with several questions. First, given the problems with the state report card, especially with smaller schools, should it really be used as a reason to “punish” schools by encouraging parents to take their children out of the school? Or would it be better to give the school more help to improve? Moreover, will private schools be able to do better for struggling K-3 readers? [Evidence suggests not https://www.cleveland.com/metro/2016/07/tuition_vouchers_arent_helping.html]
Moreover, would creation of a single community school for BG (as is being proposed) help reduce the problem of having few students end up negatively affecting the report card? Also, would a single community school help provide more resources for the struggling students?
There are many pros and cons to the use of state report cards and also to building a single new community school. But looking at the report card carefully, I still believe Kenwood, in general, is a great school for most students.
Kevin McCluney
Bowling Green
(PhD in Biology, with expertise in statistics, and Kenwood Parent)
