Colorado education officials are reconsidering the data privacy rules that for three years in a row have hidden large amounts of student achievement data from public view.
With Thursday’s release of state test results, the public has greater ability to see how well certain groups of students perform on state tests compared with their peers than they’ve had since 2015, when the state adopted a much more stringent approach.
The main change this year is that the public can see results separated by race and ethnicity, disability status, English language learner status, and economic status at the school level, rather than only by grade levels within schools. Combining results across grades creates larger sample sizes, so that in some cases they no longer had to be redacted. The practice of obscuring results for small groups of students had led to large amounts of missing information and vexed advocates for school improvement.
And state education officials are considering additional changes for 2019 that should make more information available – though just how much remains to be seen.
“In this latest release, we were very pleased to be able to see how kids are making progress,” said Van Schoales, executive director of A Plus Colorado, an education reform advocacy group that focuses on research. “We can now see if they met or exceeded standards for groups of 16 or more. We thank the Colorado Department of Education for figuring out some methods for showing that.”
A Plus Colorado was part of a coalition that wrote the Colorado Department of Education last November calling for more transparency. That group includes the Colorado Children’s Campaign, the business-oriented education reform group Colorado Succeeds, civil rights groups like Together Colorado and Padres y Jóvenes Unidos, Democrats for Education Reform, the Colorado League of Charter Schools, and the Colorado Freedom of Information Coalition.
“The current lack of transparency in student data and results is a major challenge to our collective efforts to build a better education system,” they wrote. “Results that are not transparent and comprehensive not only undermine our ability to improve students’ education, but call into question the honesty and integrity of the entire accountability system.”
Advocates and state education officials met through the spring and summer to see if any common ground could be found. The state also hired an outside firm, HumRRO, to assess its data practices.
That firm, according to Deputy Commissioner Alyssa Pearson, found that Colorado was right to change its practices in 2015 but that there was room for greater transparency while still protecting student privacy.
This debate doesn’t involve test results of individual students but rather information about how groups of students at particular schools perform. Advocates for school accountability say the ability to know, for example, how well students with disabilities or those learning English perform in comparison with their peers is key to knowing how well schools are serving all their students.
Colorado was previously one of the most open states in providing detailed information about student performance. But starting in 2015, the Colorado Department of Education withheld a lot more information, particularly when results were separated out by categories of students. Instead of hiding results just for groups of 16 students or smaller, the state hides results from additional categories of students to prevent a careful observer from working backward to determine what was in the redacted field. This is known as complementary suppression.
And instead of showing how many students scored in each tier on state tests, Colorado shows what percentage of students met or exceeded expectations. That makes it hard to know if students who didn’t meet expectations were just below the threshold or way at the bottom.
Colorado plans to keep obscuring results from small groups of students and to continue the practice of complementary suppression. There are still missing results in the 2018 data publicly released so far. However, by combining results from different grade levels within schools, a more complete picture emerges of how each subgroup of students is being served.
No single state or federal law dictates the specific practices that Colorado has adopted. In fact, federal law requires that states make disaggregated data about student performance available to the public, so long as it doesn’t end up revealing personally identifiable information. These practices are what state officials decided was necessary to prevent the release of information traceable to individual students. That provides some wiggle room to reassess those practices.
Pearson said state officials are focused on who needs to know what information and for what purposes and then trying to accommodate that within privacy requirements. They’re also revisiting the question of how likely it is a “reasonable person” could trace certain pieces of data back to individual students.
In addition to making detailed school-level data available, Colorado has revamped its own online search tool, Data Lab, to make it easier for the public to search for how different groups of students performed at particular schools. Right now the information is available across multiple spreadsheets available for download. The data from 2018 tests should be incorporated into Data Lab sometime in September.
Another change on the table: Reducing the threshold for suppressing data. State officials will decide by the end of the year about whether to lower the bar for concealing group data to 10 students, from the current 16. That would mean less data would be suppressed – but how much less isn’t clear yet.
Pearson said the state hopes to make a final decision by the end of the year so that changes can be incorporated into the 2019 testing cycle. It hasn’t been decided yet whether administrators would make that decision on their own or whether the State Board of Education would vote on the policy change.
Along with pressing the state to release more information, advocates for more transparency have also launched a Right to Know website and campaign to encourage districts and schools to share more information with families. Districts are required by law to share information from state assessments with parents, but practices vary widely across the state.
At a recent meeting of the State Board of Education, members of the Colorado Youth Congress, part of the Right to Know coalition, urged the state to do more to put this information in the hands of the people most affected.
“As a student, I want to know if my school is performing strongly or not so I can understand the setting I’m in and if I want to change to a different setting that would benefit me more,” said Jasmine Kabiri, a junior at Silver Creek High School in Longmont. “In a different situation, if we’re shown the performance data of my school, I could help motivate my school toward advancing themselves.”
Originally posted on Chalkbeat by Erica Meltzer on August 19, 2018. Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools.
