In Louisiana, some school districts are giving credit for high test scores to schools the students don’t attend. It’s called “re-routing.” East Baton Rouge, Jefferson and Iberville Parishes, “re-route” the test scores of students from seven magnet schools to the public schools those kids would have otherwise been assigned to.
Jefferson School Board member Judy Colgan, defends the practice, arguing the magnet schools were draining neighborhood schools of their brightest students and lowering their test scores. “I’m not saying magnets shouldn’t have their own set of scores,” she tells the New Orleans Times-Picayune. “They do have their own scores, and they are always at the top of the list. But we felt that because the neighborhood schools were losing those higher achievers to the magnet schools, it was only fair that their scores go back to the home-based schools.”
Huh??!?
Barry Erwin, the head of Council for A Better Louisiana, a Louisiana think tank, blasts the practice, calling it “pure deception” and “a sham.”
“Re-routing” scores in this fashion has a number of bad consequences. First, it allows school districts to create a false and inaccurate impression that some schools are performing better than they are. That’s not transparent and it’s not right. It also hurts the magnet schools because it makes it impossible to track their performance and could prevent them from receiving rewards they might earn from the state’s accountability plan. Perhaps even worse, it artificially raises the scores of some schools that may be in danger of takeover by the state because they are low-performing – and in doing so bypasses the intent of our school accountability system.
It’s hard to view this as anything other than a way to evade accountability, and state education officials are said to be examining the practice. Woody Allen said it best: No matter how cynical you are, you can’t keep up.
