The Nebraska Board of Education has approved a system for measuring how well schools educate their students. The "accountability model" is a point system the Nebraska Department of Education will use to rank schools based on state test scores and student growth from year to year. The student growth aspect gives schools the opportunity to show how much each student improves from year to the next. I believe this is the best way to measure a schools performance. Now they need to decide on other forms of data besides state assessments which can measure student growth during the school year. I prefer the MAP test (Measures of Academic Performance) for this.
No decision has been made yet on how to deal with the schools at the bottom of the rankings. One bill in the legislature would take away school accreditation if a school is on the lowest-performing list for five years. That bill would have required an intervention team to devise a progress plan for the lowest-performing schools that is reviewed annually.
Nebraska is operating under the No Child Left Behind law that requires all schools to have 100 percent student proficiency by 2013-14. This is an unrealistic expectation that all students will be proficient.
