We already know which schools are splitting up the $38 million in results-based funding for the 2017-18 school year. The money is going disproportionately to schools with students from the most affluent homes. The top 11 percent of schools by family income make up almost 40 percent of schools getting the funding. Even more of those schools would get the funding if it weren’t for a stipulation built into the formula to make sure the bottom 50 percent of schools in terms of student income make up almost half the schools getting the money. Next year, that stipulation is gone.
Most likely in the 2018-19 school year, over 80 percent of the schools getting results-based funding will be from the top half of schools in terms of family income. That means less than 20 percent of the schools will be in the bottom half.
And yet, some schools with high income students are complaining because they’re not getting their expected piece of the results-based pie. And no wonder. If a high income school makes the list, it sees close to $6,000 extra per teacher, enough to give teachers a sizable bonus and still have plenty left over for educational equipment and supplies other schools can’t afford. If it doesn’t make the cut, the school gets nothing.
An explanation of how this works can be mind-numbingly detailed, at least when I’m the guy doing the explaining, so I’ve created a table I hope will make things clearer. After that, I’ll numb the minds of those who dare stick around for all the numbers and explanations.
Take a look at the table. At the left, I’ve broken down schools by the percentage of students on free or reduced lunch, the best proxy we have for students’ family income. All the way to the right, you’ll find the percent of schools fitting into each free/reduced lunch grouping. So, about 11 percent of Arizona’s district and charter schools have 20 percent or fewer students on F/R lunch, 8 percent have between 21 and 29 percent on F/R lunch, and so on down the column. The two middle columns show the percent of schools in each category getting results-based funding this school year and an approximation of how many will get the funding in 2018-19.
Schools with 20 percent or fewer students on free lunch don’t change much from this year to next. They stay in the high 30 percent range. But schools with between 21 to 59 percent of their students on F/R lunch go from 14 percent of the total this year to 46 percent next year, a three-fold increase. They’re the big winners. The big losers are schools with 60 percent or more of their students on F/R lunch. They drop from 48 to 18 percent, a loss of almost two-thirds.
All my numbers are approximate for reasons I’ll explain toward the end of the post, but the overall picture is accurate. This year, the state decided to be a bit considerate to schools with students in the bottom half of the economic spectrum, but next year and every year after that, no more Mister Considerate Guy. Those schools will get screwed out of the money from next year until forever, which is just what most good conservative Republicans think should happen, no matter what they say when they’re pretending to be compassionate. They’re the folks in control, so what they say, goes.
OK, that’s the basics. Now I start getting deeper in the weeds. Continue at your own risk.
Why such a big change in who gets the results-based funding from this year to the next? It’s because of a change in the way the money is doled out. This year, the funding was doled out based on state test scores, but it was broken into two groups. A bit more than half the money went to the schools with the highest scores in the state. The rest went to schools with the highest scores among schools with 60 percent or more students on F/R lunch. That’s why the lion’s share goes to schools at the top, those with 20 percent or fewer students on F/R lunch, while the rest of the schools with fewer than 60 percent of their students on F/R lunch get the leftovers. If you want to track the scores, follow the money. Then the percentage takes a big jump upward for schools with between 60 and 69 percent on F/R lunch, because they’re the highest income among the schools on the lower half of the income continuum, and it falls off again after that. It works out exactly like anyone who knows how closely test scores are tied to income would predict it to work out.
Next year and into the future, only schools with state grades of A will get the money, period. No exceptions for schools with more than 60 percent of their students on F/R lunch. So the percentage of schools getting the money does what you’d expect. Since the highest income schools get the most A’s, they represent the largest percentage of schools receiving the funding, then the number decreases as you move down the income scale. There are a few small bumps where the percent of schools is higher or lower than expected, but that’s what usually happens on scales of this kind.
The school grades I’m using are based on student performance this last spring, so naturally, they won’t be the scores used for the 2018-19 school year. They’ll use the scores of next spring’s test. But it’s reasonable to assume that the distribution of school grades will be similar. Except that everything could change.
There’s a surprise in this batch of school grades, for me anyway. I expected that the number of schools in the top category would rise at least 10 percent, then the percentages would decline precipitously from there. Instead, the top category went down two percentage points. The reason is, the people who created this year’s grading system tried to make it a little bit fairer than it had been in past years when raw test scores outweighed all other considerations. The “a little bit fairer” isn’t a whole lot fairer for schools with students at the bottom of the economic scale — they still lose out big time — but more schools a few steps below the top category received A’s than they would have under the previous state grading system. That’s because of the increased emphasis on “growth points.”
Schools get “growth points” based on how much their students’ test scores increase from the previous year. That means a student can have a low test score, but if this year’s score is considerably higher than the year before, that student will earn more growth points for the school than a student with a high test score who didn’t “grow” as much. The result is, a school with high test scores can end up with a B, or even C, if its students haven’t shown much growth in their scores, while a school with lower scores can earn an A if its students have a test score growth spurt. The growth points aren’t much help for schools whose test scores are really low, but some schools with good-not-great test scores ended up with A’s while some of the top scorers fell into the B and C range.
And that’s driving some of the highest scoring schools nuts. Take BASIS, for example. This year, 2017-18, all but one BASIS school received results-based funding because their test scores are through the roof. But things don’t look so good when it comes to school grades. Ten BASIS schools’ grades are under review, so we don’t know what their grades will be, but the seven that have been scored ended up with 3 A’s and 4 B’s. Naturally, the heads of BASIS are beside themselves, screaming how unfair it all is. And they’re not alone. Among this year’s recipients of the funding based on their high test scores — meaning they have fewer than 60% of students on F/R lunch — more than 50 of them didn’t get an A. If that stays the same next year, no extra funding for those 50 schools.
The people who made the grades a little bit fairer — which is a good thing — screwed up in the eyes of the schools that know they’re supposed to be the winners. How do they know? Because they deserve to be winners, because it’s their rightful, privileged place at the top of the economic pecking order.
So the state is doing something it hadn’t planned to do. It’s going back and revising the scoring system. We don’t know what the new results will be, but I’m willing to bet the people making the revisions are starting with the results they want and working backward, tweaking the system until it yields the “right” results. I expect many BASIS charters and other schools with friends in high places will be bumped up into the A category. And since this is a zero sum game — there’s only so much results-based money, so there can only be so many A schools — other schools will be knocked down from an A to a B, meaning they’ll be out of the money.
A final note on why the figures in my table are approximate. Many charter schools don’t serve lunch, which mean they don’t know if their students qualify for free or reduced lunch. That’s true of all the BASIS schools and many other charters. That means they aren’t part of the state’s free/reduced lunch count, so I had to leave them out of my count as well.
This article appears in Oct 12-18, 2017.
So long as most of the poor schools are composed of immigrants (legal and illegal) and their children there will be little or no appetite for funding them on par with children of American citizens.
bslap, is funding the issue? I would note that TUSD high schools spend about $300 more per pupil on instruction than CFSD16, which receives no deseg funds.
On David’s article, I’ll just state the obvious. If schools like Basis have their students performing at their potential on standardized test, they are at their performance ceiling, and will not be able to show year over year improvement. It seems unfair to give them “Bs” and “Cs” under those circumstances.
Response to Nathan K:
The ceiling effect you describe likely does not exist, in fact, the actual effect may be the reverse of the way you describe.
There are two systems for calculating growth in the letter grade system. The student growth percentiles which are calculated using quantile regression of batches of students with similar score histories. Quantile regression is just a fancy way of creating a distribution table of outcomes for these similar students. In a theoretical world, you would expect no correlation between student growth percentiles and academic achievement. However, that is not what you observe. There is a significant correlation, meaning, no growth ceiling, in fact, reverse growth scoring effect.
These complex technical issues have never been discussed because policymakers and, even to a degree, the statistical wizards who analyze school results have been unable to grasp the complexity of the whole picture.
There are at least 50,000 of our tested students above the 90th percentile. If as a school, you are fortunate enough to have 1,000 of them sign up for your school, how would their test scores compare at the end of the year with the other 49,000 students distributed across all of the other schools in the state?
Do you still feel entitled to an A grade even if your results were below the average of the other 50,000 students? Would you feel entitled to an A even if your results exceed just 60% of these other 50,000? What if you look and find out that the average grade of the schools where those 20,000 top ten percent students whose results exceed yours was a B?
Nathan K- if a ceiling effect exists, it exists for all 50,000 students. It doesn’t. The vast majority of these students are well below the upper end of the measured spectrum, even at the most elite schools.
The second system, the progress towards standards, is based on a yardstick known as scale scores, scores just like SAT and ACT for measuring and comparing the test outcomes.
Every standard at every grade level was turned into a scale score by a mumbo-jumbo committee of really smart people. However, only God knows what principles they used. Year to year, some of the standards are 18 points apart, other years, they are 3 points apart. There is very little relationship between the average (standard?) growth of all students in a year and difference between standards across that same divide.
This has profound implications for teachers. A major part of the challenge for a teacher is defined by the scale score difference between that year’s standards and the starting point for each student in their class. Some teachers have to move their typical students a Mount Everest 100 points, others can put it in cruise control – all of their students are already above the standard on the first day of school. They just need to refresh their students occasionally.
The growth measures, both the quantile regression which calculates the student growth percentile and progress towards standards give full credit to a student who is at the upper end of the spectrum for quantile regression or who just maintains if they are above the standard in the progress towards standards system.
Consider this, there are 100,000+ tested students already above the standard on the first day of school. All they have to do is to not regress to be in the money, for them, no growth is considered to be above average performance.
If you specialize in collecting these students, life is different for you.
By comparison, other teachers walk into a classroom with their typical student, in fact, every student four years below the standard. Even if they are a wonder woman and Superman, they are guaranteed to be slapped in the face by evaluation systems at the end of the year. The speed of light in education is two academic years in a school year and less than 3% of all teachers keep that pace year after year.
So, even if they achieve that spectacular two academic years in a calendar year for their average student, every student will still be below standard at the end of the year. What’s worse, you can be sure that they will lose the two students who perform best in their class, have the highest gains. So the gains they do achieve will be counted on some other schools and some other teacher’s scorecard.
That’s why spectacular teachers migrate away from highly at-risk schools. They are smart, intelligent people and the systems victimize them. They want to be in systems that reinforce them and make them stronger over time, not tear them down.
You can see this phenomenon by carefully comparing all of the students of a school with their identical academic twins across the state. Quantile regression is supposed to do this but it fails miserably as you get to the ends of the spectrum that David talks about.
And, in Tucson, they are considering whether to move a lower-grade bunch of students from Catalina so that the higher-grade University High can have its own campus. On a tour last week, the campus looked like it should for minority/immigrant children -with lots of vocational and other educational opportunities and in their neighborhood. Seems like it would be better to join U High and Catalina – a move that would be good for both worlds. Back in the late 60s, Catalina had more than 2K students and worked okay without split shifts. Why not make it Catalina-University and just do it?