<img src="http://www.joplinglobeonline.com/images/zope/extra.gif" border=0>Study ranks Missouri's public schools, districts<font color="#ff0000"> w/ links to Missouri school & school-district rankings </font>

By Joe Hadsall and Melissa Dunson

news@joplinglobe.com

Royal Heights Elementary in Joplin is one the best elementary schools in Missouri, while McDonald County’s Rocky Comfort Elementary ranks among the worst in academic performance, according to the Show-Me Institute.

The ranking of 540 school districts and 2,105 schools in Missouri is aimed at giving people a more accurate view of how their schools and districts compare, said Justin Hauke, policy analyst with the St. Louis-based think tank.

“We didn’t feel like there was a tool available for parents where they can get a cut-and-dry comparison between school districts,” Hauke said. “In one school year, more than 15,000 observations for test scores are made. There is a lot of information.”

The Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education isn’t rewarding the list’s top performers or punishing underachievers. Jim Morris, public information director, said the department won’t be using or even recognizing the list.

“The list was created by the institute for their purposes,” Morris said. “We don’t rank schools in lists, because a ranked list is a crude tool for measuring improvement.”

Schools in Southwest Missouri showed up at both ends of the spectrum.

Royal Heights ranked 30th among 2,105 schools. Seven other Joplin elementary schools, three Webb City elementary schools and Webb City Middle School also earned spots in the top 25 percent. They are joined by Monett Middle School, Carthage’s Pleasant Valley and Mark Twain elementary schools, and Carl Junction Primary 2-3.

The bottom 25 percent includes East Newton, Sarcoxie, Miller, Lamar and McDonald County high schools. They are joined by Joplin’s Emerson Elementary, and Noel and Rocky Comfort schools in McDonald County.

Monett had the best high school in the area, at No. 804 on the list, followed by Joplin at No. 1,012.

In the overall ranking of 540 school districts, Webb City finished at the top among Southwest Missouri’s schools, at No. 96. Joplin came in at No. 160.

Method

The “Show Me: The Grades” project is based on 2007 Missouri Assessment Program index scores. The index is a formula based on the percentage of students scoring at each of the four levels on the MAP tests.

Hauke said that is the best option available.

“The only reason we chose to use it was that it was a standardized metric,” Hauke said. “It’s not the best way to evaluate school quality, but it’s the best of what’s available.”

But Morris, the spokesman for the state education department, said the index score was developed as a way to measure improvement within a school or district. It is meant to measure progress, not quality, he said.

“The index gives us a way to look at changes in student performance, specifically progress, across the spectrum of MAP scores,” Morris said. “It looks at the rate of change between levels and combines that into a single measure.”

The state department publishes many statistics on its Web site, www.dese.mo.gov. The data are arranged in “report cards,” and viewers can access 23 areas, including enrollment, ACT scores, graduation rates, MAP performance and compliance with the No Child Left Behind Act.

The slew of data can be difficult to read for a layman, Hauke said.

“Because there are so many measurements, it’s very opaque,” he said. “It’s hard for someone interested in learning about their school’s performance to do it themselves.”

While the Show-Me Institute is the first group to publish such rankings, it is not the first to try. Morris said the state department has wrestled with the issue of rankings for years.

“We have more information than we need. We’re drowning in data,” Morris said. “It’s hard to display all that in ways that are meaningful, without resorting to simple-minded, ranked listings.”

The closest the department has come to ranking schools is the release of top-10 MAP scores. Around April of every year, it publishes the 10 highest MAP scores in categories including grade and subject. The result is 42 separate top-10 lists.

Rankings wanted

Some parents say they want such ranked lists.

“I pay a lot of attention to the MAP tests,” Joplin parent Kathy Brown said. “But there is way too much data to worry about. I wish there was a way to compare scores.”

Kim Davis, of Joplin, also said she would like to see rankings.

“Parents should have access to that information so that we can have some choices about what we can do,” Davis said. “If my child is in a bottom-ranking school, I’d be concerned that they are not receiving the education that a majority of children are.”

Angie Besendorfer, an assistant superintendent in Joplin, worries that parents who base their school choice on one MAP index score might see excellence or problems that aren’t reflective of the entire school. The numbers are real, but Besendorfer insists that what those numbers say is not as easy to generalize.

“It’s accurate for that point in time, for that group of kids,” she said. “But we try to have multiple points of data in looking at the schools.”

Compliance with No Child Left Behind is one of many indicators left out of the Show-Me Institute report.

Though Joplin’s Emerson Elementary is ranked below Carthage’s Columbian and Fairview schools on the Show-Me Institute’s list, it is not undergoing disciplinary action under the federal law, while Columbian and Fairview are, for example.

Noel Elementary, which is ranked below Emerson, is also off the federal radar. McDonald County R-1 Superintendent Randy Smith said the school improved its test scores enough to attain compliance.

“The teachers are doing something right at that school, to get off that list of schools targeted for improvement,” he said.

Also not included are statistics on enrollment, economic background, graduation rates, attendance rates, discipline problems and experience levels of teachers.

Some of those indicators will be included in future versions of the project, Hauke said.

The Westview C-6 School District in Newton County has earned the state’s Distinction in Performance award for the past seven years, for example, but the Show-Me rankings place it at No. 1,517 among all schools, near the bottom 25 percent. Among the 540 school districts in the state, Westview is ranked No. 432.

Superintendent Jan Cox said achievement has been high at Westview, so there is little room for the improvement that the MAP tests are designed to measure.

“Sometimes, that works against us,” Cox said. “The MAP scores are driven by calculations that can be difficult to stay on top of.”

According to the Show-Me Institute’s list, the top school in Missouri is Northwood Elementary in the Raytown C-2 district. The school is described on the district’s Web site as a special-education school that serves 12 different districts and has an enrollment of just 65 students.

“A couple of the schools near the top are also magnet schools, where there is a self-selection bias,” Hauke said.

Besendorfer said every school has its own strengths and challenges. She encouraged parents to take a deeper look at the rankings and visit the state department’s Web site to look at specific grade and subject data for their children’s school.

“(The rankings) try to take something complex and make it simple,” she said. “And there’s a lot lost in the translation.”

What is Show-Me?

The Show-Me Institute advances what it calls “sensible, well-researched solutions to state and local policy issues,” according to its Web site. Its board of directors includes Rex Sinquefield, a retired financial analyst who made news with his creation of 100 political action committees, and Ethelmae Humphreys, chairwoman of Tamko Building Products Inc. in Joplin.

The Show-Me Institute supports systems that would let parents use public education funding at schools of their own choosing.

Justin Hauke, policy analyst with the institute, said the “Show Me: The Grades” project is not meant to push such a voucher system in Missouri, because the list deals exclusively with public schools. But he said the list could be used to support school choice among public schools.

“If a parent finds from this ranking that their school is not meeting their children’s needs, then why force them to remain in substandard schools?” Hauke said. “But if a parent is happy with where their children are going and that the teachers and staff are doing a good job, by all means it’s a good school.”

Show-Me board

The board of directors of the Show-Me Institute includes:

n R. Crosby Kemper III, former chairman and chief executive of UMB Financial Corp. and UMB Bank.

n Rex Sinquefield, co-founder and past co-chairman of Dimensional Fund Advisors Inc., a registered investment adviser with more than $100 billion under management.

n Ethelmae Humphreys, chairwoman of Tamko Building Products Inc. She serves on the boards of the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation and the Cato Institute.

n Michael Podgursky, a professor of economics at the University of Missouri-Columbia, where he served as department chairman from 1995 to 2005. He has published numerous articles and reports on education policy and teacher quality.

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