Renfroe Attendance Rate Reported Incorrectly To State
July 16, 2009 | 3:03 pmAsst. Superintendent Thomas Van Soelen replied to my question about Renfroe’s attendance rate attached to AYP with this note, which was also just posted over on CSD’s website…
The Georgia Department of Education has released the list of schools that made Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) for 2008-2009. For the initial determination Renfroe is not being shown as making AYP. While the academic successes of Renfroe Middle School merit a status of meeting AYP, an error in reporting attendance rate to the state has delayed this announcement.
City Schools of Decatur has submitted an official appeal and will provide the needed data to show that the attendance rate at Renfroe meets state standards. We fully expect that this situation will be rectified by the second AYP release date in September. Meanwhile, we celebrate the accomplishments of students and teachers at Renfroe and look forward to another year of meeting academic standards!
I may have missed this, but I went to the cleaners yesterday and saw that Voila had gone out of business. When did that happen?
May 18th
http://www.decaturmetro.com/2009/05/18/voila-market-cafe-closes/
THANK YOU for clarifying this issue! Whew.
Told ya it was jacked,
Shouldn’t the Superintendent’s goals be to exceed the standards not just meet them. Don’t think the government “standards” are set as lofty goals.
Not to mention that CSD set as a goal to be in the top 20 school systems in the country, can’t remember by what metric and by what deadline.
All these metrics are severely flawed and have unintended (or maybe even some intended) negative consequences. Good schools are good because of good leadership and staff, not any metric, and crummy schools are crummy whether or not they make AYP. We have to have some kind of documentation to get rid of really crummy principals and staff, the ones who aren’t clever enough to protect themselves. But we are confusing ourselves by using student performance measures to document poor educator performance. For the latter, I suggest we use our eyes and ears and go into the classroom to observe, not use poorly designed indirect measures that don’t account for all the uncontrolled factors that influence them, like level of students coming into the classroom, parental involvement, family stress and income level, behavior problems, learning disabilities, special needs, etc.
Even the term “metric” is stupid, just a form of edujargon and business jargon. Why can’t we use the conventional terms “measure” or “measurement” or “measurement system”. Metric used to be an adjective, as in “the metric system”, not a noun. Sigh. People get PhDs in this stuff, get salaries circa $150,000 for it and all I want is the 6 paraprofessionals that that salary could buy and would really allow the teachers to give “differentiated” (aka “individualized” in non-eduspeak) instruction.