High school rankings and methods of measuring student performance were the main topics of discussion at Monday night’s East Williston School District business meeting in the wake of recent results from three national surveys which rate high schools.
Wheatley School Principal Sean Feeney said Wheatley is ranked 108th, 160th and 92nd nationally in surveys conducted by U.S. World News and Report, the Jay Matthews Challenge Index, and Newsweek.
All three ranking systems place Wheatley in the top four high schools on Long Island, Feeney said.
But, he added, he believed there are flaws in their evaluation methods.
“They’re trying to measure academic achievement and they are assuming that is the only thing that matters in a high school,” Feeney said.
Feeney said the rankings don’t take art, music, theater or athletics into account. He said they also don’t factor in dual enrollment courses that offer students college credit, such as Wheatley does with Adelphi University, Stony Brook, St.John’s University and others.
Feeney said The Challenge Index, developed by the Washington Post’s Jay Matthews, only takes into account AP class enrollment, not performance. The top schools in the Newsweek rankings tend to be dominated by magnet or charter schools, he said. Only three out of the top 50 schools, he added, were open enrollment schools like Wheatley.
Stephen Leccese, a member of the Financial Advisory Committee, said while a lot of time is spent looking at these outside rankings, the school district should publish a self evalutaion.
“Why are we not taking ownership of our own rankings, publishing our own set of core values that we care about and measuring those year to year?” he said
East Williston Superintendent of Schools Elaine Kanas said Leccese made a good point about “school districts taking charge themselves of and what we value, how will we measure those things, and looking at it from year to year to give us direction.”
Leccese said he was troubled by the trend in SAT scores among the “peer districts” that Wheatley compares itself to and the ELA scores in the third through eighth grade being towards the back of the pack.
Leccese said that he feels the district is doing well, but added, “I don’t feel confident that we’re improving at the rate that others may be improving.”
“The SAT scores are not rising at the rate other districts are, in fact they have gone down,” Kanas said.
She said that to address this issue, the district is committing more money to SAT prep courses next year. She also raised the issue of the district’s values in regard to state testing.
“If we have 92 percent passing is that okay? Because then we will be able to also give attention to something else we find important. Or will we say we want 94 percent?” she asked.
Kanas also said elementary students’ English Language Arts test scores are supposed to be learning markers. She said the district’s real focus should be on SAT scores and college acceptance rates.
“I have seen districts spend enormous amounts of time and money making sure those third and fourth grade scores are as high as they can be, but the four or five or six children who needed the support early on, the resources don’t go to those children because you wanted to make the scores look really great.”
Board Vice President Robert Fallarino agreed, saying, “You don’t want to teach to the test, you want to give each individual student what they need.”
Leccese said he didn’t want to see students’ needs ignored for the sake of better test scores.
“If we’re not measuring ourselves consistently on the metrics that we care about it’s very hard to measure performance in the absolute,” he said.
