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    School Issues: 2014 Columbus City Schools Report Card

    Last year, when the Ohio Department of Education released the report card for Columbus City Schools, there was no shortage of hoopla. Mayor Coleman had a press conference, Superintendent Good looked somber, and the buzzword describing the 2013 results was “unacceptable”. The report card’s scores included four failing grades.

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    This year is different. There was no press conference for report cards. Instead, the district sent out two announcements: one in the morning, an email addressed to “Community Partners”; another announcement was released to the general population in the afternoon. This year, the catchphrase for 2014 is “Signs of Promise”.

    What does promise look like? It’s helpful to compare the assessments of 2013’s “Unacceptable” and 2014’s Promise:

    This year’s high scores, A grades, came from the district’s work with students with disabilities and students in the lowest twenty percent of achievement. Both are up from C grades last year.

    Next is its 2014 C grade: that’s for the five-year graduation rate. That was a D last year.

    This year’s D grade comes from the district’s performance index, that reflects the number of students who pass the state tests. It holds steady with its D back in 2013.

    And then the painful F grades for 2014: Gap Closing, annual measurable objectives, four-year graduation rate and the value added scores for gifted programming and annual progress. All those areas received failing grades last year, except for the graduation rate which was a D last year.

    columbus-report-cards

    So, hope? If you do cumulative GPA calculations, the grades yield a .78 for 2013 and a 1.22 GPA for 2014. Heck, the improvement’s worth ten Mom Bucks, right?

    The letter to Community Partners highlighted the third grade reading scores. It noted a move from a 43% passing rate in October 2012, to an 88% passing rate by August of 2013.

    Typically, the district has a similar passing rate every October, and a significantly higher rate in the spring. CCS student performance was in line with this pattern, and additional summer programs helped push more students into the passing zone.

    As for the ten percent who were not eligible for advancing into the third grade, the district has implemented programing that permits mid-year promotion and partial promotion. That is to say, the often-feared humiliation of failure is managed with compassion.

    Both the letters sent to the partners and the public held up several schools that had made marked gains in test scores, including schools such as Duxberry Park, Columbus Africentric and Dominion Middle School.

    If there are Signs of Promise, there are also Signs of the Apocalypse for the district. According to Ohio law, there is a process that permits parents to petition for new charter management of schools with repeated low performance. And some schools in the district seem to be in that path of repeated failure.

    Families can do their own investigation at one of several sites:

    To read more updates on School Issues, CLICK HERE.

    For more ongoing discussion on Columbus City Schools, CLICK HERE to visit our Messageboard.

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    Miriam Bowers Abbott
    Miriam Bowers Abbotthttps://columbusunderground.com
    Miriam Bowers Abbott is a freelancer contributor to Columbus Underground who reviews restaurants, writes food-centric featurettes and occasionally pens other community journalism pieces.
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