Assessment Office At DE DOE Didn’t Get Charter School SAT Scores From College Board…Oops!

In yet another colossal blunder, the Delaware DOE didn’t get the charter school SAT scores from the College Board.  At the State Board of Education meeting last Thursday, Brian Touchette and Rita Fry from the Office Assessment gave a presentation on the SAT scores for all of the high schools in the state.  But he forgot that one crucial part…the charter schools.

According to the office of assessment, SAT scores were slightly down for African-American and slightly up for Hispanics.  Touchette explained he was unable to get the information for low-income students because of glitches in the system due to the new DOE website.  What is it with this DOE and low-income data? http://kilroysdelaware.wordpress.com/2014/10/06/delaware-department-of-education-busted-for-falsifying-low-income-data-washingtonpost-huffingtonpost-edude-netde-neatoday-nsbacomm-natlgovsassoc-usedgov-arneduncan-educationoig-destateboar/

When giving the presentation, it was very visible on the graph that Red Clay was much higher than the other districts.  Touchette explained this was due to the fact charter schools are part of Red Clay Consolidated School District.  Board President Dr. Gray asked Touchette why the other charter schools weren’t included.  Fry advised her “It was not part of the table received from The College Board.”  Gray seemed perturbed by this, and Touchette said he would go back and ask for that data.

My question would be if they didn’t give them to you, and you knew you were giving a report to the State Board of Education, why wouldn’t you ASK for them?  This isn’t rocket science.  I’ll bet if it was a standardized test the DOE can make money from, they would have been the first ones at the door the day the scores were announced.  But no, that must not have been important, those scores.  Not to an ASSESSMENT office!  This DOE is proving to be more ineffective by the day.  Hopefully, they will come in one day and forget all about Common Core, Smarter Balanced, Priority Schools, Gateway, their side deals up in Wilmington, and their love affair with all things charter.  Yeah, and maybe I’ll get a singing donkey for Christmas!

Back to the SAT conversation.  In 2012, the Delaware DOE, in their infinite wisdom, became the first (and only) state to require all students to take the SAT.  As a result, their data is inconsistent with the rest of the USA.  The national average above that magic score of 1550 was 43% and for Delaware it was 21%.

The board tried to figure out why Delaware was so low.  Touchette explained the national average of 43% was roughly twice the amount of Delaware’s percentage, so they are on track if only 50% of students in the USA take the SAT.  Mark Murphy said “We’ve spent hours discussing this.  We’ve been unable to make comparisons to the different groups.”  Now I’m not as much of a data freak as the DOE is, but I’m smart enough to let them know they didn’t need to spend hours discussing this, because IT’S DIFFERENT DATA!  You can’t put a round peg in a square hole.  Yes folks, this is who leads education in this state!  But that wasn’t even the best quote of the day…

What the DOE was very concerned about was how many students took the test during SAT day.  Only 90% took the SAT during that day.  This was very crucial for them to include this.  Not sure why, but in a moment of absolute confusion, Brian Touchette actually said “These numbers don’t match and that’s intentional.”  And that pretty much sums up the current mindset of the Delaware DOE…