Assessing School Academic Productivity: The Case of Chicago School Reform

This paper considers the issues raised in using standardized achievement test scores for purposes of examining the academic productivity of schools. We critique some commonly used practices by urban school districts and suggest an alternative approach – the school productivity profile. This profile is based on an assessment of each school's contribution to student learning, or value-added, rather than just the overall level of student attainment. We illustrate, using 10-year achievement trend data from the Chicago Public Schools (CPS), both the problems with some commonly reported indicators of school effectiveness and the idea of a school productivity profile. While our analyses suggest broad-based improvements in student learning in many Chicago schools over the past 10 years, we also found that the current testing system is not well designed to make such judgments accurately. We conclude that extant standardized testing systems, like the ITBS used in Chicago, do not afford an accurate basis for assessing school productivity and how this might be changing over time. These results have important policy implications. As school districts seek to become more outcome oriented, they will need to invest in better testing and reporting systems in order to know whether they are making genuine progress in this regard.