Can You Offer Advice to This Parent in a “Persistently Struggling School”?

A comment on the blog:

I am a parent of a student at one of the state’s 20 “persistently struggling schools” LeBrun mentions in the article. We learned at a meeting earlier this week that because the school has met the state’s goals on many of the metrics used to evaluate these schools entering the receivership game, the school cannot choose those metrics to be evaluated on at the end of the year. Almost all of the metrics that are left to be chosen to be evaluated on are related to the state testing. It is all a game of trying to figure out which population subgroups will be most likely to meet the metrics when the tests are given months from now And you just keep your fingers crossed that you pick the right subgroups. (This is helping the kids how?)

It also appears that the school population as a whole has to have 95% participation in state testing to meet metrics. Is there any district in the state that did that last year? I think our school was about 80% participation last year. This is something that the school has very little control over. (To the administration’s credit, they do not strong arm families to take the test.) How can a school be evaluated on this?

Ideas of what we can do about this? The school’s plan is due Sept 30, so there’s not much we can do to change the procedure prior to plan submission. (We received the metrics from SED earlier this week, so there wasn’t much lead time.) How can we fight this even after our plan is submitted?

I am quite scared about what might happen to the school next year. No one seems to know what the possibilities even are or what rights the school and the parents have.

from novemoore http://ift.tt/1iAfYij