CAISL and School Rankings

Dear CAISL Community,

On Saturday, October, 13, Publico published the annual “rankings” of public and private Portuguese schools.  Someone is sure to ask where CAISL is in these rankings or why CAISL is not in the rankings at all. 

The answer is very simple—CAISL students do not take the tests on which the rankings are based and so, of course, does not appear in the rankings at all.   Schools which follow a non-Portuguese curriculum do not take the tests and thus are not in the rankings.  A few of the international schools also have separate Portuguese sections and these will be in the rankings. 

Several years ago, the CAISL faculty who teach Portuguese as a Native Language suggested that we should take the Portuguese Language tests.  We explored this with the Ministry of Education which said we were not allowed to take one test only.  If we took one, we had to take them all.  And we would not be allowed to have only some of our students take the test and not others (i.e. only those in the Portuguese Native Language Program but not those who do not speak Portuguese!).  Obviously, we dropped the idea.

Many of you have heard me expound before on one of my personal, strongly-held frustrations with education—the use (and misuse) of school “rankings” or, as they are called in the UK, “league tables.”

Tests serve two purposes educationally—

1.       to assess a student’s academic achievement so that the educational program can be tailored to needs of each student.  This is called formative assessment as it helps “inform” the next steps in a student’s educational program.

2.       to judge a student’s academic achievement—to put a grade “on the record.”   This is called summative assessment as it “sums up” achievement.

To use a blunt analogy:  formative assessment is like a medical diagnosis while summative assessment is the autopsy.

Rankings/League Tables are based on summative assessments. 

So what is so wrong about “ranking” schools based on summative assessments?

I could give a lot of reasons (and pages and pages of writing!) to answer that but the most basic answer is that there is no way to know which students are being tested.  Two examples follow.

First, obviously, schools have different student populations.  Public schools enroll students from a wide variety of social and economic backgrounds—and increasingly in Portugal linguistic backgrounds.  Private schools have admissions requirements often based on prior achievement including ability in the language of instruction.  Additionally, there is the fact that only those who have the economic resources can go to private schools (except for the rare scholarships) and every study ever done on academic achievement shows a correlation between economic resources and academic achievement. 

Second, there is no way of knowing which students a school decided to test.  Were ALL students in the grade tested?  Or did the school not test students who, for example, have special educational needs or who are not fluent in the language of instruction?   Did the school test only those selected students likely to do well?  Usually testing rules forbid this but it still happens.

I am always interested to read the rankings and the league tables as there are frequently schools praised for “going up a lot in the rankings” from the previous year.    On occasion, a school will jump from a low to a high ranking and then invariably the press will hold that school up as a model for others.   I refuse to believe any school can go up fast in the rankings through increased effort, curriculum revision, professional development of faculty, etc.  The only way to rise in the rankings very fast is to ensure that only students who are predicted to score well take the test.   This is done by just selecting students who will take the test or forcing students to transfer to another school.

 

CAISL students in grades 2 through 9 are currently finishing their fall MAP tests.  These Measures of Academic Progress (MAP) give teachers and parents detailed information on each child’s knowledge and skills in English Language Arts and Math.   These are formative assessments.   If you would like to read more about these tests, the web site is http://www.nwea.org/.

A workshop on MAP will be held on Tuesday, November 6, at 08h45.  This will be conducted by Katie Morris, Elementary Principal, and Nate Chapman, Secondary Principal.   The purpose of this workshop is to help parents understand MAP and how to read their own child’s report.   More information on this workshop will be sent shortly.