The five assessment areas are: student achievement, which could include success on state tests and graduation rates; school operations, which could include teacher vacancies, class sizes and serious incidents; constituent satisfaction, which will look at results of student, parent and teacher surveys; school-selected indicators, which could include the percentage of students passing advanced classes, for example; and extra credit, which would be improvement in areas identified as challenging, such as increasing the number of students in the advanced category on the state's math and reading test.
Philadelphia School District Superintendent Arlene Ackerman yesterday unveiled a new accountability system that will go far beyond standardized test scores to determine how well each school and region is performing. Ackerman is the former county superintendent of schools in San Francisco.
