The Chicago Board of Education has voted to adopt a more “effective and fair” approach to assessing the performance of schools, replacing the district’s School Quality Rating Policy with a framework shaped by input from more than 20,000 members of school communities.
The previous method, relying largely on standardized test results to judge schools’ performance, penalized schools serving predominantly disadvantaged students, district officials and research partners said.
“Part of what started this was our communities being very clear about the harm that they felt from a ranking and ratings system that didn’t just make them feel like it was something about their schools, but something deficient with them as people, as communities, as parents,” board member Elizabeth Todd-Breland said of schools issued low ratings under the prior system, which was in effect from 2013 to 2020.
Shifting toward a model of shared responsibility, district CEO Pedro Martinez said the new policy will be more responsive to the needs of school communities. Doing away with summative ratings, the “Continuous Improvement and Data Transparency” policy will instead measure a range of “indicators of success.” Those include not only academic progress but also student well-being, quality of daily learning experiences, school inclusivity and the capacity of staff to collaborate in teacher learning.
“We are really focusing on what matters most: what’s happening in our schools and filling out the gaps to ensure that our educators have the resources and the support that they need, so that we can get the student outcomes that we all want for our babies in Chicago,” Chief Portfolio Officer and CPS parent Alfonso Carmona said at Wednesday’s school board meeting, where the vote to do away with the SQRP system was taken.
How the policy was developed also matters, in fulfilling the district’s stated commitment to equity, said Natalie Neris, chief of community engagement for the nonprofit Kids First Chicago, which partnered with CPS in engaging parents, students, experts, the Chicago Principals and Administrators Association, the Chicago Teachers Union and others in the school accountability redesign.
“We can’t continue to say that we want to create systems that are fair and then not include the people who are part of those systems in co-creating and co-producing the policy that they’re impacted by,” she said.
CPS parent Vanessa Espinoza helped the district gather feedback from other families. She said the number of people who’ve responded to a survey on school performance priorities has doubled since the redesign process launched in 2019.
“We were able to engage a diverse group of stakeholders in a way where all their voices were heard,” she said, noting the surveys were completed in 13 of the 19 languages offered, “to make sure we are listening and including communities who were not included before or listened to before.” CPS typically offers community engagement materials in only five languages, Espinoza said.
The novel approach of co-creating policy with community members serves as a national model, Martinez said. “This unprecedented level of stakeholder engagement is a departure from the largely top-down approach that had been taken by the district when shaping past accountability models … setting a new standard about how we talk about accountability, how we measure it, not just in Chicago but across the country.”
Specific metrics for the new accountability plan still need to be developed, along with a site to make them transparent. Community engagement will continue throughout that work, with the new system scheduled to go into effect for the 2024-25 school year, Carmona said.
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Given state mandates, the district will continue reporting standardized test results at the school level. But those results will no longer be part of the district’s own assessments of schools.
Under the SQRP, schools were given one of five performance ratings: Levels 1+, 1 and 2+ indicated good standing, while Level 2 meant a school needed provisional support, and Level 3 denoted schools in need intensive support.
The new evaluation system represents a sea change that’s well-warranted, said Paul Zavitkovsky, a former CPS principal and now an assessment specialist for the University of Illinois at Chicago’s Center for Urban Education Leadership who served on the accountability redesign committee. Building CPS’ assessment culture around standardized tests, which are given at the beginning, middle and end of the school year, was simply ineffective, he said.
“It became sort of the de facto curriculum for the school, when the school was at risk of losing its accountability status or going from Level 2 to Level 3 or whatever. It’s not really a winning proposition to go for short-term outcomes on large-scale standardized tests,” Zavitkovsky said, explaining that’s because test scores are lagging indicators, meaning they reflect factors that play a more substantive role in learning, such as the capacity inside classrooms and schools. “That’s what moves the needle over time with standardized test scores. If you do that work, the scores will come.”
With standardized test scores closely correlated with parents’ income, the CTU has previously criticized SQRP as perpetuating racism and called on the administration of Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot to reverse the policy, which former union President Jesse Sharkey has said put schools serving disadvantaged students “on a downward spiral of student flight and further defunding.”
CPS officials also discussed the district’s partial shift to a funding model based on need rather than enrollment Wednesday, as part of launching discussions leading up to a spring or summer vote to finalize the district’s 2024 budget.
