Berea third-graders prepare for state reading test required to advance to fourth grade
(Lynn Ischay/The Plain Dealer)
COLUMBUS, Ohio - The state won't have its annual report cards for schools and school districts out until Feb. 25, making portions of the grades more than a year out of date.
Students took state tests in two rounds last school year, with the first round starting in February and the second round coming much later in the spring. Scores from both rounds are combined for each student and for Ohio's state report cards.
"What's the point of having any of this data?" asked State Rep. Andrew Brenner, the chairman of the House Education Committee and critic of the amount of testing in schools.
"This is, now, what happened in a prior school year," said Brenner, a Powell Republican. "It's going to be meaningless."
Melissa Cropper, president of the Ohio Federation of Teachers, was also bothered by the delay.
"Our concern with data that is so old is that it will not be useful in helping meet student needs," Cropper said. "Test results that might identify learning needs should be available in a more timely manner so that teachers can more effectively help students improve."
The original target for report cards was January. But state officials say PARCC was slow to send scores to districts to verify, so report cards are delayed again until the end of February.
ODE spokesperson Kim Norris said PARCC was supposed to send scores to districts by Oct. 4 for them to verify, but high schools did not receive results until Oct. 14 and elementary and middle schools did not receive theirs until Oct. 26.
"These delays caused delays for ODE," Norris said.
PARCC spokesman David Connerty-Marin could not be immediately reached for comment.
Brenner said the new delay confirms his opposition to PARCC and the state's decision in June to drop PARCC.
"This is once again proof that we should have never gone with PARCC to begin with," Brenner said.
Legislation passed this summer now requires test results to be available within 45 days, or by June 30, whichever comes first.
The state will still release some report card grades in January, but only on three items: graduation rates and the new K-3 Literacy and Prepared for Success measures the state has started the last few years.
The two items that most observers look at, grades for student achievement and academic progress, won't be available until the full results are out Feb. 25.
There will be no overall grades for students or districts until after the 2017-18 school year while the state changes state tests, learning standards and the measures used on the report cards.