More schools make the grade

The headline giveth, the subhead taketh away.

But officials worry that may only be because method of measuring test scores changed

First, what sounds like good news.

This year in Wisconsin, 51 schools and one school district - Milwaukee - failed to make what the U.S. Department of Education calls "adequate yearly progress." Last year, 108 schools did so.

Then, as first reported in yesterday's Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, the bad news.

For the first time this year, the DPI [Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction] used "confidence intervals," which represent an acceptable range of scores around a given target.

The key word here is "acceptable."

This year, 47.5% of the students in a given school or district were supposed to be proficient in math, and 67.5% were supposed to be proficient in reading. But using confidence intervals, depending on the size of the group tested, the range of acceptable test score averages increased dramatically.

For a group of 40, the percentage of students proficient in reading can range from the upper 40s to the lower 80s, and it is still as if the group met the 67.5% goal.

In math, the percentage of students who are proficient can be in the upper 20s to high 60s for a group of 40, and it will still be as if the group met the 47.5% goal.

In other words, if there is some question of how confidently results can be regarded as unacceptable, they are treated not as questionably acceptable, but as unquestionably acceptable.

Ken Cole, executive director of the Wisconsin Association of School Boards, said he was surprised so few schools were identified as failing to make enough progress to satisfy federal standards.

"I am stunned by the fact that it seems like more and more schools are doing better and better, when every prediction I've heard is, under No Child Left Behind, a few years out, more and more schools would be on the list," Cole said.

"I am troubled by the change in measurement. We never seem to be able to look at how well we do over time with any level of comfort because things have changed," he said.

He's surprised, stunned, and troubled. I'm not stunned or even surprised. There's big money in bad schools.

Meanwhile, the paper runs part four of its seven part series on choice schools, Religious schools are a top choice. Note the continuing decline of non-public schools, even with government subsidy.

MPS figures show that 21,829 children 4 to 19 years old were in private schools as of June 30, 2004, down from 27,723 in June 1998 - when the state Supreme Court opened the way for religious schools to get vouchers - and 49,306 in 1967.