By LEONARD GRAY

LULING – A new school district accountability formula under development by the state Department of Education came under criticism this week at a St. Charles Parish School Board meeting.

“How can this help but to destroy the integrity of the public school system?” asked board member John L. Smith of St. Rose. “I see no value in this.”

The formula is modeled after school accountability scoring currently being used to improve Louisiana’s public schools. However, as Dr. Juanita Haydel and Rachel Allemand pointed out, the system is self-defeating, since it does not account for already excellent systems to maintain their ranking and leaves struggling systems to fall more and more behind the leaders.

Allemand is the district’s executive director of curriculum, instruction and assessment. Haydel is an administrative assistant to the superintendent.

The system, as Haydel explained it, focuses on continual improvement and is made up of two elements: a district performance score and a district responsibility index.

The DPS, similar to a school performance score, has a top level of 100, matching the state’s 10-year performance goal.

Its purpose is to let the community know the overall performance of a school district.

“We expect to be at or near 100 our first time out,” Allemand said.

But, since there are no performance level labels or consequences, reporting the results “only adds to the lack of confidence of public schools,” Smith said.

The DRI has four indicators including the school performance scores for each district, rate of improvement by students on standardized tests, summer school improvements on those same tests and percentage of certified teachers.

Each indicator is expressed as an index where 100 is “good” and 150 is “excellent.”

The DRI scores run from unsatisfactory to poor, good, very good and excellent. However, problems develop when a school district starts out near the top range of the scoring with little room for improvement, she added, as she expects St. Charles Parish to be.

Once that top-end score is reached, the standards will be raised once more and the district will be again pushing for those levels. However, other school systems will find those higher goals more and more remote.

“It’s just not appropriate, nor is it fair,” Superintendent Dr. Rodney Lafon commented.

More meetings are planned before implementing the plan to iron out the questions which remain, Haydel added.