Manipulating the numbers
Department of Education more concerned with image than truth  

Everyone wants to know “How are our schools doing?” But far too often the data we get out of the Virginia Department of Education are skewed to promote an image of skyrocketing improvement.

Gov. Warner crows about our 94.6 percent graduation rate. Guess our schools are doing so great that almost everyone leaves school with a diploma, right? Not exactly. That is simply the number of seniors who end up graduating.

Mr. Warner apparently assumes that citizens are not interested in hearing about all the other students who drop out earlier in their academic career.

Roanoke Del. William Fralin thinks Virginians might want to know about that, which is why he has sponsored HB19 that will require the DOE to change the way it calculates the graduation rate.

Basically, it would use a formula that would take the number of graduates divided by the number of first-year ninth-graders four years before. Unfortunately, the graduation rate will take a nosedive to the lower 70s using these new, more accurate calculations.

It will be interesting to see if our new governor, Tim Kaine, is interested in accurate data or wishes to retain the old “happy” numbers of past administrations. It is still early, but no other legislators have signed on to Mr. Fralin’s bill.

The DOE told me they have no opinion on the bill. Why would they want to see the graduation rate drop by 20 points?

But this obsession with “happy” numbers doesn’t end there. An even worse example of distortion has been with the Standards of Learning figures. Now I will not get into the issue of whether or not the SOL program is good for kids. People could argue about the pros and cons of that all day long.

But what is blatantly dishonest is the way the SOL numbers have been manipulated to convince the public that things are extraordinarily wonderful. Who wouldn’t be thrilled about the meteoric rise in accredited schools? The numbers are stunning. From 2 percent accredited in 1998 to 92 percent in 2005.

Now, what the DOE won’t tell you is that if they used the exact same accounting methods to determine accreditation today as they did in 1998, the number of accredited schools would be in the under 50 percent range instead of 92 percent.

How can this be? Through numerological calisthenics that enable some schools to be accredited that would not if the same accounting methods were used. Methods such as lowered pass scores, bonus points, new test retake rules and “adjusted” scores.

Let’s assume that all those changes make the process fairer. Fine. But when you change the accounting rules so dramatically, you can’t continue to make honest comparisons to past years’ SOL accreditation results.

Unless of course you are more interested in showing dramatic gains. If a corporation told investors that profits were way up but neglected to mention the new accounting methods, the SEC would be all over them.

I asked Charles Pyle, spokesman for the Virginia DOE, if he thought it was fair to compare 1998 SOL results with today. He wouldn’t answer the question, simply saying that the state did not make comparisons of the different standards employed during those two times.

Then-president of the Virginia Superintendent’s group, Edgar Hatrick, told me in an e-mail last year that he thought the public is getting an accurate picture because the old 1998 “standards, some of the test questions, and some of the pass scores were not good measures.”

There’s two of the leading advocates of the SOL program. One doesn’t want to talk about how the rules have changed. The other says that the old measures were bad measures. Yet both are eager to brag about how much better our accreditation rates are since 1998.

If the majority of the legislators and education officials believe that pass rates can actually distinguish between good and bad schools, learning and not learning, if they have so much faith in the program, then why aren’t they also concerned about muddying up the data with these inflation schemes. Could it be that they just like “happy” numbers?

If the DOE wants to continue to tout standards and accountability, they need to take a hard look at themselves first.

Robert Legge is an independent columnist and resident of Madison County. His column appears each Thursday. E-mail rjma@highstream.net.