Measuring excellence in Sisters schools

Sisters students' strong performance on recent standardized tests relative to other Central Oregon schools supports the commonly held notion that Sisters schools are excellent.

But actual excellence is hard to define. How well do Sisters schools prepare the community's youth to face the challenges of the broader world? Since graduation from high school is the place where the rubber meets the road in terms of local students encountering the world's standards, how does Sisters High School measure up?

For the last 10 years, Newsweek magazine has been publishing a national ranking of the nation's public high schools. On the initial Newsweek list back in 1998 not a single school in Oregon made the list of 230 schools rated as "the best high schools in the country."

In 2010, 13 Oregon schools made the Newsweek list. Corbett, a small high school in the Columbia basin, was ranked No. 5 in the nation. The next nearest Oregon school, Sheldon in Eugene, ranked No. 702. None of the Central Oregon schools made the list.

When asked about the Newsweek ranking, Superintendent Jim Golden surveyed the list and noted that most of the schools on the Newsweek list were also on the list developed by the Oregon Department of Education (ODE) based on the schools' No Child Left Behind (NCLB) performance.

As Principal of Crook County High School, Golden had visited almost every school on the Newsweek list. He was looking for the keys to their performance.

(To check out the ODE Statewide Report Card for yourself visit http://www.ode.state.or.us/search/page/?id=1821.)

"Once our 'dashboard gauges' are in place and working," said Golden, "I'm going to invite the school board members on a junket to visit these schools to observe what works for these schools."

Golden will be watching the SAT and ACT tests to help gauge how well Sisters students fare nationally in competitive college entrance exams. Golden prefers the ACT over the SAT because the ACT is nationally "normed." Normed tests measure students against their peers as contrasted to measuring to some specific level of knowledge on a subject.

Golden indicated that he would be looking for funding to bring in several other ACT preparation and testing programs that check students' readiness in earlier grade levels.

Sisters students performance on the ACT can be used to indicate individual student performance. The Oregon Assessment of Knowledge and Skills (OAKS) tests give an indication of how well a district is performing relative to the others districts in Oregon. Sisters students performed very well by that measure (see "Sisters schools shine on state tests," The Nugget, September 15, page 9).

Golden indicated he would be looking to the NAEP (National Assessment of Educational Progress) for an indication of how Sisters was doing against a national standards.

The NAEP's charter is to develop measures that effectively compare the national level of education on a state-to-state basis. A cursory look at the eight grade NAEP scores for 2009 have Oregon ranked 25th in math, 26th in reading, 20th in science (2005), and no ranking for writing. (See http://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard.)

All of these measures can help the Sisters community better understand how well Sisters students may fare in comparison to national performance.

Finally, in a "The Best Countries In The World" study, published in the August 23 issue of Newsweek, a number of key national performance factors were developed to indicate the potential for success in the world economy.

One critical measure was, not surprisingly, education. The United States did not even make the top 10 in education. Finland, South Korea, Canada, Singapore and Japan were the top five.

If the Sisters community feels that it has excellent schools - with a unique physical location, outstanding community involvement and support, an extraordinary offering in the arts and an excellent teaching staff - how can those qualities be measured and quantified?

To be able to maintain the perceived excellence of Sisters schools in the face of ever more daunting budget challenges, the Sisters school community must be able to measure the key elements that make the schools excellent to avoid losing these elements when the inevitable program cuts must be made.