State takes time to correct data errors, official says
By Jennifer Eisenbart
Staff Writer
The Burlington Area School District, like the rest of Wisconsin, will have to wait another two weeks before seeing its report cards.
The Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction announced last week that the first of school report cards – the state’s first step in evaluating schools under stricter terms for an Elementary and Secondary Education Act waiver – would be delayed until Oct. 22.
Originally, the cards had been set for release Monday of this week. However, BASD Assistant Superintendent Connie Zinnen got word last week of the delay.
The reason, she said, is the numerous requests the DPI has received about errors in the data and concerns about releasing inaccurate or incomplete data.
“Rather than release the report cards to the public with known errors, they felt it would behoove them to correct as many errors as possible,” said Zinnen.
BASD was one of the school districts that noted errors, filed with the DPI and confirmed there were errors. Last week in a presentation on the report cards to the BASD Curriculum Committee, Zinnen had expressed concern that the incorrect data would be circulated to the public in the preliminary release – before the DPI had a chance to correct it.
“You always hate that when something comes out and people know there are errors,” said Zinnen last week. As of Tuesday, some of the issues with incorrect data had been resolved, but not all of them.
“The DPI, yesterday, released another private showing, if you will,” Zinnen said Tuesday. “They corrected some mistakes already. We were among those.
“Not all of ours were corrected,” she added. “I’m hopeful it will be corrected by Oct. 22.”
From there, it will be a process of explaining the system to the public. Zinnen went into great detail with the process last week, as well as the two weeks before in addressing the testing procedures and the ESEA waiver that the state report cards will attempt to quantify.
Schools will fall into one of five categories based on the new accountability determination: “significantly exceeds expectations,” with a score between 83-100; “exceeds expectations,” with a score between 73-82.9; “meets expectations,” with a score between 63-72.9; “meets few expectations,” with a score between 53-62.9; and “fails to meet expectations,” with a score below 53.
The goal, Zinnen explained, is to address which schools need improvement, and the state will intervene at schools that don’t meet the minimum level.
Schools that are at “significantly exceeds” or “exceeds” will be used as example schools for training purposes, while schools that “meet expectations” will be subject to local control of improvements.
Schools that fall into the bottom two categories can expect the state to intervene.
“I don’t think they’ll be well understood, because it’s complex,” said Zinnen of the report cards, saying all the different components will likely create confusion in spite of district efforts to define the process. “I think people are really going to look at that number – I don’t know if people will really understand what’s making up that number.
“We’ll field any questions we can in trying to help people,” Zinnen added.
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