Percentage of Students in Failing Schools Increases in Face of Higher Performance Threshold

Recently, the Louisiana Department of Education sent out a press release listing the public schools that are still “failing” under the state accountability system as well as those that have been removed from the list of failing schools based on preliminary School Performance Scores.  Schools that are closing, whether their preliminary School Performance Score indicated that they were failing or not, were unscored for 2010-2011.  Based on this list, I did a few calculations to determine the number of students that attended failing schools in 2010-2011.

Using the 2011 list of failing schools and the 2010-2011 enrollment, I calculated the number of students that attended failing schools in the year that they were failing. This is different than the number that usually gets discussed.  When talking about the “number of kids in failing schools,” we usually mean the percentage of students currently enrolled in schools that failed the previous year i.e. using the 2010-2011 SPS and the 2011-2012 enrollment.

Since we don’t have enrollment for this upcoming school year, we can’t determine how many kids will be attending these failing schools.  We can, however, determine how many students attended schools that failed while they were there.  I believe this is a more important measure because it tells us how many students were actually failed by these schools and not how many students are in schools that may or may not fail them over the course of the next school year.

As we discussed in an earlier blog post, there are two ways to calculate this number.  You can include students in unscored schools as part of the total number of students or you can exclude those schools and their students. There were a total of 20 unscored schools, nine of which were newly opened or did not have enough years of testing data to calculate scores. Seven additional RSD schools scheduled to close and therefore not included in the state’s preliminary report are expected to have had School Performance Scores in the failing range.

If schools with no rating are included in the total population, 22% of students attended failing schools last year.  If we do not include unscored schools, that number becomes 25%. All of the schools considered failing in Orleans Parish are RSD schools – 11 charters and 10 direct-run schools.

The percentage of students that attended a failing school last year is an increase over the previous year’s percentages of 18% and 21% (using the 2010 SPS and the 2010 enrollment, a different measure but still useful for comparison purposes).  It is important to note that the SPS threshold to not be considered failing was raised to 65 this year from 60, which accounts for all of the increase.  If the threshold had remained at 60, the percentages would be 12% and 14%.

Even though more schools were labeled AUS, the preliminary scores demonstrate continued growth in the Recovery School District (RSD). In fact, four RSD schools labeled AUS last year raised their SPS enough to shed the AUS designation this year, despite the higher bar: Andrew Wilson Charter School, Harriet Tubman Elementary School, Algiers Technology Academy, and James Weldon Johnson School. Nonetheless, the increased standard makes clear that public schools in New Orleans and Louisiana, while on the right track, have a long way to go to truly meet the needs of all students. Next year, the minimum SPS will increase again to 75.