State: New math may be why schools go from F to A

TALLAHASSEE -- Gov. Jeb Bush visited Fessenden Elementary School in Ocala on Friday, touring classrooms, speaking Spanish to students, tying some children's shoes.

The occasion? Fessenden was one of two schools in the state that made the remarkable leap from an F to an A grade this year, based on test scores.

But four months after the school grades came out, Fessenden principal Loretta Jenkins still isn't sure whether the big improvement stemmed in part from a bureaucratic change: For the first time, state officials discounted scores of "mobile" students -- kids who come in and out during the school year -- when they calculated A through F grades for Florida's schools. Her school has a lot of mobile students.

On Friday, the state Education Department announced that subtracting scores of the mobile students "likely did not have a substantial impact on school grades overall," though it could have benefited some schools.

The department also described the vast majority of Florida schools as having "stability rates" of above 90 percent -- meaning the same children are enrolled in both October and February of the school year.

And the department said 95 percent of the fourth-, fifth-, eighth- and 10th-grade students in the regular curriculum who took state tests in February 2000 had been enrolled at the same school the previous October.

Reaction to the "stability" numbers ranged from skepticism to outright disbelief.

"I really find that hard to believe," said Marcia Gibbs, principal at Belleair Elementary in Clearwater, which went from a D to an A grade this year and struggles with a large number of mobile kids.

"If we have (an enrollment of) 400 kids, we probably see 600 during during the year," Gibbs said. The school keeps logs of the number of students who enter and withdraw every day. Those kids pose greater challenges because they may have gaps in learning from moving or may not be used to the curriculum, among other factors.

School officials supported the state's move to subtract the scores of mobile students because they didn't want to be held accountable for a child who showed up just before test day. But educators such as Jenkins would like to know more about how subtracting those scores affected her school's grade, and she also is skeptical of the Department of Education's stability analysis.

"You can take data and make data sort of like work to your advantage to make your point," said Jenkins, who one day this year had seven new students walk into her school. The "mobility rate" for Fessenden was 46.3 percent in 1998-99 and is about 42 percent now, she said.

The state calculates a school's mobility rate by comparing the total number of students who enter, re-enter and withdraw from a school with the total number of kids enrolled at the start of the school year.

Of the 38 elementary schools that jumped three letter grades or more this year, 23 had annual mobility rates in 1998-99 above the state average of 35 percent.

Education Commissioner Tom Gallagher has criticized the state's method of calculating the mobility rate because he says it allows the same mobile students to be counted more than once. On Friday, Gallagher called the mobility rates "stupid numbers."

He also said the Education Department is not going to do a school-by-school analysis that would clearly show how many mobile students' scores were discounted, what those test scores were and whether the discounted scores caused a school's grade to go up. However, the department plans to provide data to schools that will show how mobile students performed.

His department's analysis on stability rates convinced him that "less than 5 percent of the schools could have been affected" by discounting mobile students' scores, Gallagher said.

"That's nonsense," said Cathy Kelly, director of government relations for the Florida Education Association. "I think very clearly that for those schools with high mobility rates, it absolutely had to have an affect."

In a political season, Gallagher and Bush want to attribute the improvements at schools to hard work and high standards, not a change in calculating school grades.

"If there's bad news in Florida schools in this election season, they're going to keep that from the public's view," said Tony Welch, spokesman for the Florida Democratic Party.

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Lucy Morgan

From the Times state desk