There is a new website that publishes information on schools. Run by a collaborative that includes Standard & Poor's, the Council of Chief State School Officers and others, the site (School Matters) contains a
variety of data on schools. But, as a story in today's Washington Post ("S&P Opens A Rating Service On Schools") points out, not everyone is happy with the quality of the data presented:
some school district administrators said some Web site numbers are wrong, out of date or easily misinterpreted. Sharon Ackerman, assistant superintendent for instruction in the Loudoun County schools, said staffing trends and class size numbers for 2002 to 2003 were out of touch with reality. One page of the Web site said some schools in Loudoun averaged 132 students in each classroom, she said.
Of most concern to me is the attempt to create analytical scores. The site includes S&P developed indicators (ratios). However, when you attempt to access them, you first get the following warning:
Stop! Use S&P Ratios with Care.
Standard & Poor's (S&P) provides ratios to help education stakeholders understand the complexities surrounding public education. S&P intends for these ratios to inform the decision-making that can help improve student performance, and does not intend for these ratios, alone, to be used to draw conclusions about school systems' performance. With the hundreds of facts and figures used to evaluate school systems, S&P offers these ratios as a place to begin asking diagnostic questions.
S&P acknowledges that data are not perfect and that even the best statistics have limitations. These ratios should be considered with other academic, financial, and demographic indicators provided on this website. Pulling individual data points out of context to create a ranking is a serious misuse of the data and S&P strongly discourages users of this website from using data in this way.
You are also given the options of going to the welcoming statement by former NC Governor Jim Hunt (advisor to the project) which includes the following warning:
Using RaMP, or one of S&P's other indicators like the Return on Spending Index (RoSI) or the Performance Cost Index (PCI), helps users understand the complexities surrounding public education. However, these ratios should not be used alone to draw conclusions about education performance. These ratios should always be considered with other academic, financial, and demographic indicators provided on the website. I also urge you to read the SchoolMatters glossary and user advisory to better understand the proper use of S&P ratios.
Now, I'm sure that there must be a lot of heavy internal politics that is going on over these warning statements. But I am still mystified as to why they are doing that. Would S&P put out data about companies with such heavy caveats? If not, then why do it about schools. Maybe someone can enlighten me.
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