Critics claim Michigan’s “Top-to-Bottom” ranking of school quality, developed in 2010 and 2011 as part of a No Child Left Behind waiver, punishes schools for serving children from impoverished backgrounds.
According to the Michigan Department of Education, the “Top-to-Bottom” list is part of Michigan’s school accountability system which ranks schools on their student performance in mathematics, reading, writing, science, and social studies, and also graduation rate in high schools. School performance components include student achievement, improvement, and achievement gaps between the highest and lowest scoring 30 percent of students in each school.”
The Mackinac Center for Public Policy, a free-market think tank in Midland, Mich., has helped spearhead criticism against “Top-to-Bottom.” Hillsdale professors Brad Birzer, Burt Folsom, and Gary Wolfram serve on the Mackinac Center’s Board of Scholars.
Audrey Spalding, Mackinac’s director of education policy, published a study this year, entitled “Michigan’s Top-to-Bottom ranking: A measure of school quality or student poverty?” Spalding argues that Top-to-Bottom effectively singles out schools that serve students from primarily low-income families, and it does not give enough credit for the learning gains made by such students.
“States have to have some way of ranking schools, not only to meet federal guidelines, but also because tax dollars are being used and people deserve to know how effectively their money is being spent,” she said.
Educators have attacked the list as well. David Britten, superintendent of Godfrey-Lee Public Schools near Grand Rapids, Mich., said that Top-to-Bottom merely correlates with a list of Michigan’s poorest schools.
“Did we really need another expensive system for identifying which schools and districts have higher rates of poverty than others?” he said.
Locally, Top-to-Bottom places Hillsdale High School within the top 5 percent of Michigan schools in the “progress” category of academic quality, as indicated by the “Reward School” status presented on the school district’s website homepage. Despite this ranking, nearly 25 percent of Hillsdale school district’s students are reported to live in poverty—the average for the state of Michigan, although up from about 10 percent in 1999.
If Spalding, Britten, and others are to be believed, a rising percentage like this one could harm the indications of Hillsdale’s educational quality in the long run.
Although there is widespread acknowledgement of Top-to-Bottom’s flaws, there is varying opinion over what is to be done.
“I especially like [Spalding’s] push to expand school choice and to give extra support to charter schools that open in districts with low-ranked schools. Only in education do we deny families the choice of where to send their children,” Folsom said. “Opening up more districts to school choice is a partial solution to the problem of low-performing students in poor neighborhoods.”
But Britten disagrees with Spalding and Folsom on this point, claiming that school choice does not address “inequality in school funding” where it already exists. In addition, Jane Zehnder-Merrell, the “Kids Count in Michigan” project director at the Michigan League for Public Policy, views the state’s poor record differently as well.
“The fact is we can’t leave children behind economically and expect them to achieve academically,” Zehnder-Merrell wrote in September. “Federal and state policymakers need to consider and fund initiatives to reduce poverty among families with children. Our economy is shaped by federal and state policies.”
Small-government advocates like the Mackinac Center and its affiliates are not likely to share the Michigan League’s vision, and Audrey Spalding claims the fight has just barely begun.
“This issue is especially relevant because the Michigan Legislature is considering a bill that would change the way the state grades schools. The proposal would place a greater emphasis on student growth, which would likely help reduce the penalty for schools that serve disadvantaged students,” Spalding said.
“While there is an opportunity to improve the Michigan’s school ranking system, federal requirements severely limit the state’s options. Michigan does not have the ability to grade schools entirely on student academic growth, for example. This is an unfortunate consequence of top-down accountability efforts.”
