Most home buyers (with help from their Realtors) quickly become adept at navigating our local school systems and identifying which properties will afford their kids the best public school education possible and safeguard the value of their investment.
How many of them, though, realize that the most commonly used measure, the Academic Performance Index (API), is based solely on a narrow band of standardized tests and, even more pertinent, has not been updated in over a year and a half as new testing based on the Common Core takes the place of our old assessments?
A change is in the works – the article linked to below details educator’s efforts to quantify a wide range of variables that demonstrate not simply how well children in a particular district or zone test at the end-of-the-year, but rather how effective our schools are at educating every child regardless of demography.
The downside? It may be at least three years before we have new tools in place to assess our institutions and advise our clients.
“There is near-universal agreement among educators and policy makers that a new system should be distinctly different from the API, which is calculated by weighting school and district scores on various subject assessments. Instead of a single number with consequences tied to end-of-year standardized tests, there should be multidimensional measures reflecting the complexities of school life and performance, including potentially hard-to-quantify indicators of school climate, as well as test scores and indicators of success in preparing students for college and career options. State board President Michael Kirst uses the analogy of gauges on a car dashboard that display oil pressure, temperature, battery capacity and mileage, each measuring different components of a car’s performance.”