SwampFox

Lessons from the SC Education Oversight Committee: Moving from Testing to Governance and Leadership

Submitted by: John Warner on Jun 14, 2011 at 8:08 am Tagged with: K-12 education Source: Swamp Fox

I have served on the SC Education Oversight Committee since the first of the calendar year. The committee is an independent body overseeing accountability testing in the state. As of this week, it seems likely the legislature will do away with the committee as an independent entity.

In my short time on the committee, I am very impressed by the knowledge and professionalism of the EOC staff, and the passion and dedication of other members of the committee.

I have learned something very important serving on the committee. The committee has some of the most knowledgeable people about public education in South Carolina. A decade and a half into one of the most rigorous testing regimes in the country, we can say that some schools in South Carolina are performing well and others aren't.

The level of family affluence and paternal education is highly correlated to a student's performance. We don't seem to have a handle on how schools are performing relative to what we would expect given the demographics they serve. The principal and teachers in a highly affluent neighborhood with high test scores may actually be underperforming relative to a principal and teachers in a high poverty neighborhood with lower absolute test scores but much higher scores than would be expected from their demographics. That is critical to understand.

We can point out some schools and districts that outperform what would be expected, in Darlington and Spartanburg, for example. We understand that the difference is leadership, but this seems to be so illusive and intangible we don't know how to replicate it. Putting the right leaders in place is a question of governance, but differences in governance and leadership are not in our analysis of high performing schools in South Carolina

To date. accountability has primarily been about testing. We put a label on a school as excellent or failing. Going forward, those labels should reflect the demographics served. Otherwise, you have teachers in poor schools performing extremely well who are demoralized because their excellence is not recognized. You also have teachers in affluent schools complacent though they are not performing at the level they should given the neighborhoods they serve.

South Carolina needs to lead the nation in moving from a paradigm of accountability being mostly about testing, to a paradigm of accountability mostly being about governance and leadership. Charter schools, for example, are focused on the issue of governance. I'm a supporter of charter schools, but nationally a large percentage of charter schools do not out perform traditional public schools in the same neighborhood. Those that do outperform often turn out to have a selective student body either because highly involved parents self-select by entering the lottery or because of high attrition rates under-performing students drop out of charters. One of the most important rationals for charters is they have the freedom to innovate and the best practices they discover can help improve all public schools. Therefore it is incumbent on us to understand what is different about the governance and leadership of outperforming charter schools, or any outperforming school for that matter, that can be replicated in other schools across the state.

In South Carolina we need to move from understanding which public schools are performing well to understanding why they are performing well so we can apply their lessons to all schools in the state. At the end of the day, we all know that will come down to how schools are governed which results in the right leadership being put in place. That's where our focus needs to be.