Schools plan closely eyed

Adviser expects ‘a lot of questions’

State Superintendent of Education John White’s plan to overhaul the way public schools and students are evaluated is sparking questions, concerns and some praise, officials said Wednesday.

“I know there are still a lot of questions to be answered,” said Brigitte Nieland, a vice president of the Louisiana Association of Business and Industry and a member of a key advisory panel that reviewed White’s plan on Tuesday.

White’s proposal is aimed at reducing federal requirements on public schools in exchange for tougher, state-imposed school standards.

The plan is in the form of a waiver request that will be submitted to the U.S. Department of Education by Feb. 21.

However, the wide-ranging list of changes sparked controversy Tuesday when White unveiled the package to the Louisiana School and District Accountability Commission, including details on how public schools will be rated.

The commission includes educators, business representatives and parents who advise the state’s top school board.

One key part of the proposal would change the way the state assigns letter grades to about 1,500 public schools, which are linked to school performance scores.

Under current rules, attendance and dropout rates are part of the grade for schools from kindergarten through eighth grade.

Under White’s plan, those school scores would be based solely on test scores.

Nieland questioned whether removing attendance and dropout rates from the equation will change student behavior.

“There were a lot of questions,” she said of Tuesday’s meeting. “It was a very healthy conversation.”

Commission member Stephanie Desselle generally praised White’s plan.

“What they are trying to do is really good,” Desselle said.

However, Desselle also questioned plans to remove attendance and dropout rates from the annual snapshot of school performance, especially knowing that more than 2,000 seventh- and eighth-graders quit school year annually.

Nieland said she also has reservations about removing “plus” and “minus” from public school letter grades, which started being issued last year.

Under current policies, schools that meet their annual growth targets get a “plus” on their grade.

Schools that drop from the previous year get a “minus.”

White said he wants to simplify the calculations.

But Nieland said the idea behind the “plus” and “minus” was to give schools incentives to improve, and won approval from the state Board of Elementary and Secondary Education after lengthy talks.

“Now I am open to looking at all the data, trying to keep an open mind,” she said.

“But it is one of those things where there is history there and you don’t concede those kinds of battles easily,” Nieland said.

BESE President Penny Dastugue, a commission member named by Gov. Bobby Jindal, said she initially balked when she heard that dropout and attendance rates would be removed from school performance scores.

However, she later concluded that, since dropout and attendance figures only account for 10 percent of the score, it makes sense to link the scores only to test results.

“It has everyone focus on achievement,” she said.

Dastugue also noted that White’s plan is subject to change, including a review by BESE.

Michael Faulk, president of the Louisiana Association of School Superintendents, said he likes White’s plan to launch a new bid to aid about 230,000 students who are performing below grade level. The state has about 700,000 public school students.

“Where we can speed up the growth is to take below-basic kids and work with them and get them up,” Faulk said.