The Accountability Framework Working Group Made Their Recommendations, Will the Governor and the State Board Agree with Them

Delaware Online posted an article: Opt-out penalty for DE school considered. It is frustrating enough to know we are going to label our schools once again, but now we are going to penalize them as well. Schools and districts have no control over a parent who decides to opt their child out of the state assessment, so why should we hold a school or district accountable? The feds are requiring states to penalizing schools and districts for low participation rates and AFWG members were assigned to come up with the penalty; they selected the least destructive penalty. At this time, we are not sure if the Governor or the State Board will agree.

At the last AFWG meeting the members decided on the following:

• DOE reported they must add a consequence for not meeting participation rate. The group decided on the following:
  • School must write a plan for how they will address low participation rates.
  • Cannot be a reward school if the participation rates is less than 95% using NEAP.
• DOE did state the Governor recommended and would prefer the multiplier for schools that are below 95% only, as the consequence the participation rate, but members stated they did not agree with that choice.
• The group decided on using a 0 to 500 point system.

As I said in an earlier post, I got the impression that the Governor wanted certain things to come out of this group and I got the same impression from the State Board representative.

I will say it again, why do you put these committees/groups in place and waste their valuable time away from their schools if we are not going to listen to them, they are the experts. I hope the Governor and the State Board will respect the opinion of the experts and keep the final recommendations from the Accountability Framework Working Group as is.

DESS Advisory Committee (stakeholder group) agreed with the AFWG recommendations, it will be interesting to see what happens next, will the recommendations stay the same?