Accreditation and Not ...

[My friend and colleague John R.  --"Keep'em Honest" -- Butcher has an excellent posting on his  crankysblog site.  Check it out.] 

By John R. Butcher
February 3, 2016 by crankysblog

The Virginia Department of Education (VDOE) has updated its 2015-16 Accreditation data.  I earlier discussed their byzantine, opaque process for accrediting Virginia’s public schools.Well, some of those schools.  

You won’t find a rating for Maggie Walker, for instance, because VDOE counts the scores of the MW students at high schools they don’t attend.  And that just scratches the surface of the “adjustments” that boosted the accreditation scores this year by 6.1%.

This year they made it even easier to avoid “Accreditation Denied” by relabeling some denied schools as “Partially Accredited: Approaching Benchmark-Pass Rate” or “Partially Accredited: Improving School-Pass Rate, or “Partially Accredited: Reconstituted School,” among others.

Adjustments or not, relabeling or not, VDOE could not get entirely away from Richmond’s second-from-last place performance on the reading tests or its sixth-from-last place on the math tests.  

The initial accreditation results showed Richmond with 37.8% accredited, v. 77.6% of the state’s schools and, more to the point here, with 15.6% “To Be Determined.”  VDOE now has acted on five of the seven Richmond TBDs, which bumps the Accreditation Denied rate from 4.4% to 8.9% and the Reconstituted rate from zero to 6.7%.  Here are the new data:

Note that one of the new schools is Elkhardt/Thompson; the relabeling converts Thompson’s earlier “Denied” rating into “New School.”  All told, 53% of the Richmond schools were warned or denied accreditation this year with two schools still TBD and another failed middle school, Thompson, hiding in the definitional weeds.

The keel of this sinking ship is the middle schools: King denied; Hill improving;  Binford, Brown, and Henderson reconstituted; Elkhardt/Thompson new and camouflaging the denied Thompson.  Only Franklin, which includes both middle and high school grades, is fully accredited.

Data are here.