Data on AUSL turnarounds offer more complete picture

The investment

In addition to the per-pupil funding provided by the district, the Academy for Urban School Leadership gets extra money from the district to spend on turnarounds. AUSL Executive Director Donald Feinstein says that the additional money is still not enough to provide all the resources and professional training that a school needs to be rejuvenated. He also relies on private philanthropy, such as the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which gave AUSL $10 million in 2006 to use for five years. When that grant ran out, AUSL won another two-year, $2 million grant from Gates.

Uneven achievement

Based on ISAT scale scores—rather than the percentage of students who meet or exceed standards, the measure that is typically reported—the AUSL turnaround schools have higher achievement, albeit marginal, than comparable neighborhood schools. The lowest scale score is 120 and the highest is between 329 and 410, depending on grade.

Area rankings

Morton School of Excellence is the only AUSL school that out-performed other schools in its network in reading and math. Howe Elementary School, also on the West Side, was a top performer too. The three schools that outranked Howe are new magnet or contract schools.

Value-added scores

Based on the district’s value-added test scores, only one AUSL school, Curtis, made better-than-expected gains in reading compared to similar schools. According to the district’s color-coded ranking, green means students are making faster growth than their peers in similar schools, yellow signals similar growth and red is slower growth.

On the bubble

CPS has trumpeted the improvement in ISAT scores made by AUSL turnarounds. But ISAT improvement can be deceptive: Schools can look as though they are improving dramatically simply by moving a group of students just over the line into the “meets standards” category. More AUSL turnaround students are in this category than at neighborhood schools in general.

Tougher tests

CPS leaders have been pushing the notion that the ISAT is a faulty barometer of student learning, but the district still relies largely on it to rank schools as Level 1, 2 or 3–the best to the worst schools. This year the district published school-level results on the NWEA and on the 8th-grade EXPLORE, both of which are considered more difficult than the ISAT and give a better picture of how CPS students perform compared to children nationally. The results show that the ISAT-based rankings are no predictor of achievement on these tougher tests.

Strict discipline

AUSL turnarounds emphasize a calm school climate. Principals insist that students are capable of adhering to the strict discipline, but the turnarounds have more misconducts than other schools.