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Recent Blog Analyzes Indiana School's Accountability Ratings

By Allison Zeithammer

Posted January 17, 2020

school cafeteria

More than half of schools in the state received a rating of "met" or "exceeded" expectations. (Allison Zeithammer)

The Indiana Department of Education has recently released federal school accountability ratings.

The federal accountability system evaluates students on an expectation scale from "exceeds expectations" to "does not meet expectations," while the state's accountability system evaluate students on an A-to-F scale.

The accountability ratings assessed by the federal system shows that over 56 percent of high schools and 53 percent of elementary and middle schools recieved a "meets expectatons" or "exceeds expectations" score.

Education blogger Steve Hinnefeld writes about education policy and politics primarily in Indiana.

After analyzing the ratings alongside the rate of students recieving free and reduced luch, he questions how well the ratings reflect school's ability to serve students.

In his recent blog, "Indiana's federal school ratings, the good and bad," Hinnefeld covers the ratings of students in both public schools and charter schools on the federal expectation scale.

He says that the major thing that caught his attention after analyzing the data was that there was a school divide.

"Schools that met or exceeded expectations for the most part tended to be low povery schools--schools that approached or did not meet expectations tended to be higher poverty schools," said Hinnefeld.

Students were rated through their performances on the 2019 ILEARN and ISTEP standardized tests.

The results show that 37% of students in grades 3-8 were proficient in math and english/language arts.

In some of the higher poverty schools, proficiency scores were in the single digits.

Hennefeld says that in our area, Monroe County school's ratings follow a similar pattern as the state.

"There are some high poverty schools that for the most part are approaching expectations, not 'aren't meeting' but are approaching, and low poverty schools tend to be 'met expectations'," said Hinnefeld.

Hinnefeld includes a bar graph in his blog that displays accountability rates of students who recieve free and reduced lunch, which is commonly used to highlight poverty in a community school system.

The chart shows that 75% of students who recieve free and reduced lunch fall in the "did not meet progress" category.

On the other hand, close to 20% of students "exceed progress" in schools that recieve free and reduced lunch.

To put these ratings into a different perspective, about 3/4 students on the free and reduced lunch system recieved the lowest expectation standard, while the other 1/4 students recieved the highest expectation standard.

 Hinnefeld says that in order to see change in these ratings, that there needs to be new change in components to ensure growth in education systems and that standardized tests shouldn't be used to provide results for everything.

"I think that if we're going to rate schools, evaluate schools, it's really important to have a better, more sophisticated-- but also clear and easy to understand way of doing that," said Hinnefeld.

State officals have delated state accountability grades due to a drop in student scores on the new ILEARN test.

They expect to release 2019 state letter grades after lawmakers finalize legislation not to penalize schools for the drop-in course. 

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