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Home > Blogs > Get on the Bus > Archives > 2008 > August > 17
Sunday, August 17, 2008
In search of a “data driven” school district
In today’s paper, I did my best to give readers some perspective on how attendance was affected by the lack of busing for high school students during the first week of school.
But the truth is, my math is just guesswork.
As much as school officials like to talk about how “data driven” the city schools are in the classroom, in the central office it seems even the most basic data is hard to come by.
Let’s look at the problem we are trying to analyze: Has the lack of district-paid busing negatively impacted attendance during the first week of school?
There are a couple way to evaluate the question. The most forward is to simply look at the attendance rate. Of the students enrolled in each school, how many came to school each day? Sounds easy, but it isn’t. School officials cautioned that their first day of school enrollment figures are notoriously off the mark. That’s because kids transfer, move, drop out, etc. It usually takes a few weeks, they said, before those numbers are reliable.
Still, how far off are first day enrollment numbers? Maybe 10 percent? Because even if its that much, the attendance rate at some of the high schools last week were still atrocious.
Consider Meadowdale High School. Using the district’s admittedly fuzzy first day enrollment figures, attendance was only 71 percent last week. That’s awful. The state expects 93 percent enrollment for report cards, as a frame of reference. But let’s give the district a break. Since they don’t have better numbers, we’ll guess that Meadowdale’s first day enrollment is off by 10 percent. After making that adjustment, it would mean attendance last week at Meadowdale was more like 79 percent last week. That’s much better than 71 percent, but still pretty awful.
So I had a better idea. What if we just compared the first day attendance numbers for 2008 against the first day enrollment numbers for 2007? They should be roughly comparable, and it would eliminate the variability of “enrollment” figures during the first week.
School officials said they would try to get me that number by the end of the day Monday. Then they said they’d try to get it by the end of the day Tuesday. By Friday, they apologized profusely, but the bottom line was they still were unable to produce last year’s first day enrollment numbers after five days.
Folks, these are very basic numbers, the kind of baseline data any organization should be tracking. And even if the district wasn’t tracking enrollment closely for whatever reason don’t you think it might have occurred to administrators to pull that data for comparison’s sake since everyone has known for weeks that the impact of busing changes was going to be paramount during the first week of school?
It has to make you wonder how academic data is handled.
Meanwhile, Dayton schools have a serious concern. Even by these fuzzy measures, attendance looks to be pretty low. Interim Superintendent Kurt Stanic said he will re-evaluate attendance and busing after Labor Day. Stanic has a point that in Dayton has a long-term problem with attendance before Labor Day. But can the district really wait nearly a month before it starts making judgments about its transportation problems?
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