School jeopardy

By Peter Downs

Next month, the Missouri State Board of Education is expected to oust the elected school board in St. Louis and replace it with an appointed panel. It is a move that could have far-reaching consequences for school districts across the state.

The ability to impose an appointed panel on a local school district hinges on a corruption of the accreditation process for political ends. There is no doubt that the St. Louis School District met six accreditation standards, the minimum number needed to retain provisional accreditation, in the latest annual performance review. An appointed panel cannot take over the local school district if it is provisionally accredited, however, so the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education has to manipulate the data in order to justify denying provisional accreditation to the school district.

The data from St. Louis that DESE appears determined to toss is the data for graduate placement, which is the number of high school graduates who go on to college or technical school.

By Nov. 17, 2006, it was obvious that the St. Louis district met this standard. That's when DESE sent the district a letter instructing it to redo its data for the last five years. DESE waited until Feb. 1 to tell the district how to redo the data, however, and then gave the district only 27 days to do so.

The letter from DESE directed the district to include the following information on every graduate: Graduation year, copies of the graduation programs listing each graduate, first and last names of graduates, placement type, race, gender, birth date, name of college attended and city and state of college attended.

DESE normally does not require districts to identify each graduate by name. It is enough to identify the number of graduates from each high school and the number going to college, technical school or work.

Because the data are sent in annually, the new requirements from DESE amount to saying that the data the state had accepted many times in the past are suddenly unacceptable. In fact, two years of the data now rejected by DESE were used when DESE accredited the school district in 2004.

Also keep in mind that graduation programs are not official documents and are prone to errors. Students who have to make up a credit in the summer may not be listed, and even students who decline to participate in the ceremony but are still graduating may not be listed. These unofficial lists from the district's 12 high schools are not things the district office has routinely kept.

The St. Louis district underwent an intensive accreditation review only three years ago. The accreditation cycle is supposed to last five years, and DESE spokesmen have said repeatedly that the annual performance review is not used for accreditation but to give school districts a sense of the direction in which they are heading. Yet, here we are only three years into an accreditation cycle, and DESE wants to manipulate the performance review to take accreditation away from the district.

It is no wonder that so many people in St. Louis say DESE's attack on their elected school board is based on politics and not education. And therein is a danger to every school district in Missouri.

If DESE can manipulate the accreditation process to support a predetermined political solution in St. Louis, what is to stop it from doing so anywhere else in the state? What is to stop the commissioner of education from saying, "I'm tired of this small, rural district here. Let's pull their accreditation and make them merge with this other district," and then manipulating the performance report process to make it happen?

And if DESE can manipulate the accreditation process to get one result, why can't it manipulate it to get another result? If DESE is allowed to manipulate the accreditation process for political ends, why would any college or university think state accreditation in Missouri means anything?

DESE's manipulation of the accreditation process for St. Louis is opening a Pandora's box that can only have grave consequences for every school district in Missouri.

It is to everyone's benefit to tell DESE to stop what it is doing and go back to doing things right.

Peter Downs was elected to the St. Louis School Board in April 2006.