School report cards draw sharp response in Sisters
By Jim Cornelius

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School report cards from the Oregon Department of Education drew fire from Sisters educators last week.

The school performance ratings listed Sisters Elementary School and Sisters High School as "satisfactory"; Sisters Middle School received a "strong" rating.

"This is absurd," said Sisters Elementary School Principal Tim Comfort. "I don't even want to participate in this system anymore, it's so discouraging."

Comfort noted that the school received a "strong" rating in student performance on statewide assessment tests, an "exceptional" rating in student participation in those tests and a "strong" rating in attendance. Yet the school was rated "satisfactory" overall, a rating Comfort believes sells the school short.

"People who know the school, who visit the school, who have kids here know that's not accurate," Comfort said.

Comfort's dissatisfaction is not with the result alone. He continues to be frustrated by the use of attendance rates as the quantifier of student behavior. He also sees test scores as a narrow way of evaluating student performance.

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"(The criteria) are incredibly limited," the principal said. "They're just being reported because they're all they can measure."

Last year, the Department of Education acknowledged that criteria for assessment were limited and promised to work on refining them. The report card itself states that "as we gather more data, we hope in the future to report how education dollars are spent, class sizes, student participation in extracurricular activities, school safety and student discipline."

Comfort has his doubts.

"I guess my faith in their ability to improve the system was unfounded," Comfort said.

Sisters High School also rated "satisfactory." Student performance on statewide assessment tests "stayed about the same over time," according to the report card, earning a "satisfactory" rating in that category.

However, Sisters High School students outperformed their peers in comparable schools and across the state in each of the tests -- reading, writing, math multiple choice and math problem solving.

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High school students also met or exceeded statewide and national scores on college assessment SAT tests -- with a high percentage (63 percent) of students participating last year.

The school rated "strong" in the student behavior category, which in high school rates both attendance and dropout rate. Sisters' attendance rate was 90.5 percent last year, compared to 93 percent statewide.

The dropout rate of 4.1 percent was well below the state average which has ranged from 6.6 percent to 6.9 percent over the past five years.

Sisters Middle School received a "strong" rating, improving over time in statewide assessment tests, with an "exceptional" number of students taking the test.

Despite winning a positive rating, middle school principal Lora Nordquist, believes "the report cards are fatally flawed."

Nordquist was quick to note that she does not fault the Department of Education for a flawed system. They received a mandate for school accountability from the legislature, Nordquist said, and "are doing the best they can" with a limited budget and difficult-to-quantify issues.

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The middle school principal believes it would be much more effective to study a discrete, unchanging group of students over time to track progress and improvement. She recognizes that such tracking is not likely to happen statewide.

"That's too complicated data analysis to do on such a large scale," she said.

According to Nordquist, the best way for parents to get a handle on their schools' quality is to ask for information on discipline referrals, test scores, teacher experience and turnover --Êinformation individual schools should have no problem providing.

"Most profoundly, I'd say 'come in and visit for a couple of days,'" Nordquist said. "That observation would probably give you the best picture."

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