Standard & Poor's School Evaluation Services
September 2002
The Gadfly has previously grumped that Standard & Poor's much-discussed School Evaluation Services (SES) left something to be desired. (See, for example, Ray Domanico's guest editorial from November 2001 at http://www.edexcellence.net/gadfly/issue.cfm?issue=82#1249.) The biggest problem then was that the data SES provided to its two main client states, Pennsylvania and Michigan, were all district wide, not school-specific. Our spirits lifted when SES issued terrific school-level reports on charter schools sponsored by Central Michigan University. (See http://www.edexcellence.net/gadfly/issue.cfm?issue=50#1377.) Now we're even cheerier, for the latest evolution of SES analytic offerings is getting really useful. New district-level AND school-level reports for Michigan are accompanied by flexible analytic tools that can be accessed by policymakers, educators, analysts, and parents alike. You'll find a general description of these new offerings at
http://ses.standardandpoors.com/ and a revealing new analysis of Michigan school districts at http://ses.standardandpoors.com/pdf/mi_findings.pdf ("Beyond the Averages: Michigan School Trends"). Particularly tantalizing is S&P's newly developed "performance cost index," a way of comparing the dollar cost of attaining various education results, such as high-school graduation or passing levels on the Michigan assessment. Also available in this report is a discussion of Michigan districts that "achieve more with less", i.e. that get extra educational bang for the buck. Better still, if you poke into the Michigan portion of the SES website, you can now get down to the building level for every public school in the state and there you can learn a lot about their performance on state tests, that performance disaggregated by student group (as NCLB requires), staffing ratios and more, including comparisons of individual schools to their counties and the state. It's still not perfect; for example, cost data are not available at the building level, there's no simplified "school report card" for parents, and some other things one might want to know about a school (such as its teachers' qualifications) are not there yet, either. Nor does it track performance against specific academic standards or give teachers (and parents) feedback on their own students. (Other excellent systems do, such as Project Achieve, which you can find at www.projectachieve.com, and Schoolnet, at www.schoolnet.com.) But S&P's SES is emerging as a terrific building-and-district-level information system and the only one we've seen that seeks to link school-system performance to the cost of producing it.
