Rural schools beat the odds in new report card

Most area elementary and middle schools performed better than expected in a new statewide report card released this week by the Mackinac Center for Public Policy in Midland.

Frostick Elementary School in Croswell scored highest on the report card among area schools. It placed in the advocacy group's top 100 list of best elementary and middle schools. Frostick’s state ranking was in the 95.9 percentile.

Colette Moody is principal at the rural school in Sanilac County which has an enrollment of 527 students in grades K-4. She described reaction from staff on their school’s top ranking in the area as “humbled to be recognized.”

“(Lisa Shaw, a counselor and student service worker at the school) said we do a good job of making school fun, and it shows in (students’) performance. They enjoy it when they’re here. You can see our staff enjoys coming to work every day. It took a whole team effort: teachers, custodians, aides, lunch people, everyone has an impact on our kids,” Moody said.

The report card uses a University of Arkansas formula to predict how socioeconomic factors influence standardized test performance. For each school, the percentage of students eligible for free or reduced-price lunches is used to calculate how the schools would perform on the Michigan Educational Assessment Program.

The Mackinac Center is nonprofit think tank that advocates for conservative issues.

The report card differs from data available on the Michigan Department of Education website, which also discloses free and reduced lunch data for every school, but that factor is kept separate from student assessment results.

“Simply put, our study seeks to show how well schools perform academically, recognizing the significant challenges that tend to come serving more students of a low socioeconomic status. We use multiple years of data to demonstrate more stable and meaningful results,” said Ben DeGrow, Mackinac Center education policy director and the study’s co-author.

A school’s “Context and Performance” score, or CAP score, indicates how far above or below projections a school performed, given its student population’s socioeconomic status.

A CAP score of 100 means the school performed as expected. Schools with scores greater than 100 performed better than expected, and those scoring below 100 performed worse than expected.

“Including this (socioeconomic) factor provides a more accurate assessment of a school’s performance, since research has shown that student backgrounds can have a large impact on academic performance. Report cards that do not consider these differences among schools can understate the performance of schools serving high-poverty students and overstate the performance of schools serving relatively affluent students,” according to the Mackinac Center report.

DeGrow noted that Sanilac County schools “particularly distinguished themselves in exceeding expectations for performance and among their rural peers.”

Schools along with Frostick that surpassed academic performance predictions in Sanilac County, earning ‘A’ grades, were Meyer Elementary in Lexington and Deckerville Elementary. Brown City Elementary received a ‘B’ but still outperformed expectations, with a CAP score of 106.6.

Cros-Lex Middle School scored 105.09.

Middle-schoolers at Brown City High School received a CAP score of 108.95. Deckerville's scored 107.25.

"We were thrilled to see Brown City High School ranked in the top 7 percent and the elementary in the top 11 percent academically when placed on an equal footing with all other schools in the state of Michigan," Brown City Community Schools Superintendent Doug Muxlow said in an email.

"There are so many dynamics that affect a child and their ability to come to school ready to learn, we appreciate when those factors are accounted for as far as assessing a school district's performance.

"We have become very intentional in our early grades at ensuring a solid foundation so that once at the high school level our students have the opportunity to flourish, which they are. And that is due in no small part to an exceptional staff, motivated students, and very supportive community."

In St. Clair County, the top schools to surpass expectations were Algonquin Middle School and Algonac Elementary School, which has since closed, received CAP scores of 105.54 and 105.45, and Gardens Elementary in Marysville, which scored 105.45.

Algonac Superintendent John Strycker said he was pleased with the results.

“I don’t know if it’s a surprise, so much as not really knowing where we would fall in with the rest of the county, how we rank in different facets,” Strycker said.

He credited families of students and the larger community with the promising results, then school staff and the board of education as “extended family.”

“For any school that does well, it starts with the family and the community, because if you don’t have that as your base, if you don’t have core family values, it’s tough to do well,” Strycker said. “It starts in the home.”

Among Port Huron Schools, only Thomas Edison Elementary surpassed performance expectations, with a CAP score of 101.81.

Port Huron Schools community relations and marketing director Keely Baribeau declined comment, stating the district does not use the Mackinac Center for Public Policy as a source in its policy decisions.

“We have no ability to verify the report, how its scores were determined or the validity of its findings,” Baribeau said in an email. “So it would not be appropriate to ‘defend’ or ‘promote’ our ranking in such a list.”

The full report card and a searchable database is available at: www.mackinac.org/CAP2015

Contact Syeda Ferguson at (810) 989-6276 or email her at syeda@thetimesherald.com. Follow her on Twitter @shossainfe.