Livingston County R-III was among a litany of school districts last year with a performance report that could have put its accreditation in jeopardy.
But this year, it has the highest score in Missouri, swelling more than 35 points to receive 96.1% of the points possible — a synthesis of student test scores, attendance, school-district planning and other metrics.
Holliday C-2 School District swung the opposite direction. After scoring in the top 20% of Missouri’s 550 districts and charter schools last year, it now sits among the bottom five with zeros and “null” across standardized testing criteria.
The Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education released its annual performance reports on Monday, which measure districts on standardized tests, attendance rates and other factors. It showed 70% of districts had a lower score for the 2022-23 school year than the previous year.
But school administrators are raising red flags about the data, pointing to massive swings in scores in both directions across the state and wondering — with only a year to go before the data will impact school-district accreditation — whether the testing program’s formula needs to be adjusted.
“In some districts that I know of, who are having essentially the same faculty and the same students using the same resources and the same methodologies are seeing perhaps a 10 to 15% drop in their (annual performance report) score from the first year of MSIP6 to the current year,” Kyle Kruse, superintendent of the St. Clair School District, told The Independent. “That raises some question marks for me.”
The Missouri School Improvement Program 6, known as MSIP 6, is being phased in over a period of three years for the department to be able to fully apply its point system. This year, the program included “growth scores,” which administrators say can lower the district’s overall grade and be misunderstood.
“What (the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education) is calling the growth scores really isn’t growth at all,” Gregg Klinginsmith, superintendent of the Warren County School District, told The Independent.
He said the growth scores show if students are beating expectations on standardized tests but don’t represent how much the student body has learned. A school can receive a low score for growth, but it only shows that students are not meeting the target the growth formula predicted.
Klinginsmith, who serves on the MSIP advisory committee, would like a deeper look at the way growth is calculated. He’s asked for a copy of the formula, only receiving a summary of it rather than the full calculation.
When The Independent asked for the formula’s documentation, the department pointed to resources that summarize the calculations.
Reports from 2013 explain the Missouri Growth Model in more detail, though the multi-step formula is blotted out from the technical documentation.
Doug Hayter, executive director of the Missouri Association of School Administrators, said educators have a lot of questions about the growth model.
“There’s more work to be done in investigating that change because that has had an impact on the scores,” he said. “And I’m not sure that everyone really fully understands how it works and the impact that it’s having.”
It really boils down to “how well DESE predicted your school will do,” Klinginsmith said. “They adjust that formula from year to year, and the growth scores really is what is separating districts.”
“The lack of transparency on it is an even bigger issue,” he continued.
The model relies on predicting standardized test scores based on previous years’ performance and comparing the result to the prediction. The Department of Elementary and Secondary Education believes the model reveals a school’s instructional effectiveness, according to the summary report.
The previous annual performance report scores were the first in the sixth version of the Missouri School Improvement Program, and growth scores were only available for English and math. Monday’s release, which gives scores from the 2022-23 school year, includes growth points for social studies and science as well — an additional 12 points of MSIP 6’s possible 192 points.
Growth is a quarter of a school district’s score. Other data includes the maintenance of school improvement plans, attendance and career and academic plans for students entering high school.
Kruse believes there are “cliffs” throughout the scoring system — so crossing a threshold, like a 90% attendance rate, can boost a score significantly and not proportional to the actual performance.
The department’s guide to MSIP 6 shows scoring tables where points are assigned in levels. For example, the “postsecondary readiness” metric (which looks at students’ scores on the ACT and advanced coursework) gives schools 10 points for student averages 75% and above. For 67.2% to 71.4%, schools receive 7.5 points.
There are many table-based scores in the MSIP 6 system, allowing districts to drop in score while performing similarly to previous years.
“This year, in year two of the MSIP 6 accreditation system, we may have exposed some potential flaws in the system that will need to be studied and addressed,” Kruse told The Independent.
Under MSIP6, fewer schools are scoring high marks when compared to the previous scoring system.
In 2018 under MSIP 5, 371 school districts and charter schools scored at least 90%. Now, just 26 districts and charters met that target.
Growth is one of the things that is measured differently between the two systems.
“In MSIP 6, a (district) must show growth using the Missouri Growth Model in order to receive full points. In MSIP 5, a (district) could earn points through status, growth, or improvement — or through a combination of status and growth or status and improvement,” the department’s chief communications officer Mallory McGowin said. “This policy change was made based on feedback from multiple stakeholder groups.”
A bar chart showing the distribution of scores looks more like a bell curve now than the top-heavy MSIP 5.
Lisa Sireno, assistant commissioner of the office of quality schools, told reporters last week that the department believes MSIP6 is “a more accurate representation of performance.”
Hayter said some educators have questioned the scoring when looking at districts’ ranking between the two scoring systems.
“They’re not afraid of accountability, but they want it to be fair and balanced,” he told The Independent. “Where is the realistic picture of so many districts in MSIP5 apparently doing exceedingly well, and then now because we change the system, they’ve been dispersed.”
The top-scoring district in 2018, Clever R-V School District, is 331st under MSIP 6 — sinking from 99% to 75.2%.
Although it has become harder to maintain a top score, the score needed to be an accredited school district has not changed.
Sireno said that full accreditation is 70% and above, under 50% is unaccredited and between is provisionally accredited.
The department is set to make accreditation decisions after reviewing next year’s data. But Klinginsmith worries the scores aren’t steady enough to make the classification decision in a year.
Scores this year moved by an average of 5.4%, in either direction, with some districts seeing larger changes.
A total of 42 districts’ and charter schools’ scores decreased by at least 10% compared to their last annual performance report, and 39 had an increase of at least 10%.
Kruse worries about the number of districts losing double digits in points.
“If a school does essentially the same performance and the district score drops 10% or 14%, I don’t think that’s an accurate portrayal of how that district is serving students,” he said. “That has ramifications that go beyond just the school setting. It goes into how a community could be perceived.”
If based solely on this year’s scores, 447 districts and charter schools are in the accredited range, 99 would be provisionally accredited and five are in the unaccredited tier.
The five in the unaccredited range, four charter schools and one single-school district, are smaller and more likely to be impacted by changes in the student body,
McGowin told The Independent that classification decisions would consider all three years of MSIP 6 scores.
Klinginsmith hopes the department will look at districts’ highest scores in each category over three years to determine accreditation.
“That gives everybody an opportunity if they have a good year to carry that through to show, ‘hey, we can do good things,’” he said.
Ultimately, though, he — and others — would like a second look at the scoring system before it determines districts’ fate.
