PEER REPORT PRAISES AREA SCHOOLS

Cape Girardeau, Jackson and Sikeston school districts may make great athletic rivals, but they shouldn't compare notes when it comes to student achievement.

That is the opinion of the Public Education Evaluation Report (PEER) released Thursday by the Missouri Partnership for Outstanding Schools. During a press conference Friday at Cape Girardeau Regional Airport, representatives of the group applauded Cape Girardeau and Jackson school districts for being caught "doing something right."

"As I have looked at the scoring these two districts have done, it is a remarkable story of how well a job they have done in educating students," said Peter Herschen, chairman of the partnership board. "The wonderful thing about the PEER report is that it catches school districts doing something right."

The partnership is a private, nonprofit organization that works to increase support for locally controlled educational reforms that increase student achievement. The organization has worked 15 months to develop a tool that would identify public school districts that share similar traits and resources other than athletic competition or enrollments.

The report will be issued annually to help districts and patrons manage and improve student achievement.

"Athletic teams play against other schools and end up with scores, so people know how well they did or didn't do because they had a valid basis of comparison," said Herschen. "Until this morning the schools in Cape Girardeau never had a valid base of comparison against other schools that were like them so that mom and dad and the principal and mayor and you could say Wow, we did well.'"

In the PEER report, the organization divided the state's 524 school districts into 20 groups using public information obtained from the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education. With the help of the Office of Social and Economic Data Analysis at the University of Missouri-Columbia, school districts were clustered based largely on their participation in the federal Free and Reduced Lunch Program and their per-pupil expenditure, a figure that demonstrates how much money a district spends on each student.

"We have tons and tons and tons of research that show those are significant factors relative to student achievement," said Dr. Bruce A. Jones, director of the Office of Social and Economic Data Analysis. "A comparison of school districts in the same athletic conference is not a rigorous study of those districts with regards to student achievement."

Jones said other factors were considered during the groupings, but the main two factors were the only ones that had significant data on hand and had been proven to correlate to student achievement. Other factors, including drop-out rates, graduation rates, minority enrollment and student mobility, were listed in the report to help readers know more about the groups in their cluster.

"We realize there are thousands of variables that contribute to student achievement," he said. "However, there is very clear research that indicates the Free and Reduced Lunch is a major factor to student achievement."

Although Cape Girardeau, Jackson and Sikeston school districts are of similar size, enrollment should not be the leading factor for comparison, Herschen said.

"Enrollment is what most people look at, and that is the least of correlations used to compare academic results," he said. "Would you compare the Kansas City school system with its 34,000 kids to Springfield with its 26,000 kids just because they're large districts? No, because the districts are not alike."

Based on the PEER report, Jackson should be comparing its student achievement on Missouri Assessment Program tests to the Ozark School District in Christian County, Herschen said. The districts are very close in the major factors used in the report, and Jackson had one of the state's highest percentages for achievement on the math MAP for fourth-graders.

"If I was in Ozark, whether I be a parent, community leader, educator or political leader, I'd pick up the phone and ask "What are you doing? How are you doing so well?" Herschen said.