NCLB Scoring Errors?

The new Kentucky No Child Left Behind (NCLB) scores for 2009 have been out less than a week, but at least two school districts are already questioning their reports.

The most recent situation was covered by the News-Graphic from Georgetown. Under the title, “Schools score 94.7 percent, fail No Child Left Behind” (Subscription), the newspaper includes comments that the Scott County Public School District found mistakes in the number of its learning disabled students in the new report.

Per Scott County, the NCLB report shows 188 more learning disabled students than are actually in the system. I calculate that figure would be more than 30 percent too high, based on the number of learning disabled students in the system one year earlier.

This error could point to a number of problems, but the leading suspect at this point is the Infinite Campus student tracking computer program. This is a program with teething pains, as we have noted before.

Scott County isn’t the only school district with concerns. The first school system to question the new NCLB results is the Barren County School District. According to the Glasgow Daily Times, the district’s director of Instruction and Techonology, Benny Lile, spotted some “discrepancies” which the paper didn’t discuss further.

I called Mr. Lile, who has a long history of service to state education as the past chair of the statewide School Curriculum, Assessment and Accountability Committee. He indicated the problem in Barren County also concerns questionable numbers of students who were reported as learning disabled.

It will be interesting to see if more districts have similar problems.

As an aside, I also talked to Mr. Lile about how Barren County is handling the new testing data. He is going to be doing a good job with that task. His district will take a detailed look at the data broken down by individual test and by student subgroup performance. I think that is exactly what the legislature intended when they disbanded the CATS accountability system with its overly simplistic single-score-for-everything approach, which just wound up hiding lots of problems.

Lile’s district isn’t going to do anything with the unofficial, CATS-like number called the “Transition Index” that a consortium of private groups concocted this year. Lile recognizes that single number can hide all sorts of underlying problems and mostly just serves to confuse the public about what is really going on in their public schools.