By Shannon Gilchrist and Bill Bush, The Columbus Dispatch
COLUMBUS – First the good news for Columbus City Schools: The district has nowhere to go but up.
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Ohio’s largest school district is tied with Mansfield City Schools for the worst grades out of 608 regular school systems rated in state report cards released Thursday. They were the only two not to score anything better than a D in any of six categories and ten sub-categories.
For most of Ohio, as with Columbus, the report cards are bad news: Generally, the report cards reveal a sea of mediocrity dotted with some islands of high performance — and looming icebergs of low performance.
Not one traditional school district in central Ohio earned an A for “performance index,” a measure of how well students scored overall on state exams. And the majority of central Ohio’s districts earned F’s on “indicators met,” which measures how many of their students scored as proficient or above on each of those tests.
This was the first year in a long time that Ohioans could make an apples-to-apples comparison between one report card and the prior year’s because the state kept changing standardized tests. There was plenty of sobering news for almost every district, particularly when looking at scores for individual school buildings.
For example, in the “achievement” component, which represents the number of students who passed the state tests and how well they performed on them, 68 percent of 2,785 public school buildings across Ohio earned a D or F.
In Columbus City Schools 97 percent of its buildings earned a D or F in that category; South-Western schools, 90 percent; Groveport Madison schools, 80 percent; Reynoldsburg, 64 percent; Hilliard schools, 59 percent; Westerville, 48 percent. And Dublin schools, 21 percent.
Ohio’s education department says student achievement in the state improved in every subject area last year.
State superintendent Paolo DeMaria says district report cards show more first-time test takers in 2017 than in 2016 scored proficient or higher in every subject area.
But DeMaria says families should judge their schools by more than report cards because they don’t measure teacher engagement, arts offerings and more.
The percentage of students testing proficient fell for only two tests; 5th grade math and high school history.
Public schools’ overall performance index rose nearly 2.5 points, and graduation rates improved.
The state says educators and students are continuing to adjust to new tests, higher achievement targets and more challenging expectations.
Districts won’t face consequences for poor report cards until 2018.