Kansas City schools deserve Missouri accreditation, national education group says
The Missouri education department asked a respected and powerful national urban education coalition for its assessment of how Kansas City Public Schools performed over the last few years.
The group’s answer: “KCPS has made substantial progress and has only gained momentum,” in academics, leadership and other areas. It concluded: KCPS is “worthy of a fully accredited district.”
That’s good news for KCPS, but the blessing from the Council of the Great City Schools alone won’t determine whether the state will raise the district’s status from provisionally accredited to full accreditation.
That decision could come this summer, but that’s not set in stone, officials with the Missouri Department of Elementary and Scondary Education told The Star.
“KCPS has improved faster in both reading and math than the state and most other major city school systems,” Michael Casserly, executive director of the council, said in a statement shared with The Star.
Accreditation has been an elusive goal for KCPS for nearly a decade. Not having it, district officials say, has hampered their efforts to change the perception that it is a troubled school system. Since 2011, the district has been battling attendance problems and struggling to improve student achievement to regain its full accreditation.
Twice in the last four years, Kansas City has come close to the goal — meeting the accreditation standard one year and then slipping below it the next. The state requires a district that has lost accreditation to meet certain performance measures and maintain or improve on them for at least two consecutive years before it considers bumping up its status.
The Council of the Great City Schools is the nation’s primary coalition of large urban public school systems, 76 in all, including Chicago, New York, Boston and Los Angeles. It regularly keeps track of how well each of its member districts, including Kansas City, is performing.
Casserly said it had last assessed KCPS performance in 2016 at the request of district Superintendent Mark Bedell, who at that time was beginning his leadership here and wanted to know what he was walking into. Last fall, after a conversation about KCPS with Missouri Education Commissioner Margie Vandeven, the council began another assessment using raw district data set to its own performance metrics.
Missouri education officials said the council measures KCPS progress differently than they do.
“We have great respect for the Council of the Great City Schools’ position,” said Chris Neale, an assistant state commissioner of education. “We found it informative and interesting.” But, he said, the council compared KCPS against other urban districts across the country, while the state must judge it on state standards to determine “how well students are performing and how fast they are improving.”
Bedell agrees that council data and state data are “apples and oranges.” But, he said, “we know that we have been doing a wonderful job of growing these students at a fast pace, and that means a lot. It’s a part of the state’s accountability — taking kids who may not be up to par when they show up and closing those gaps.”
Academically, Bedell said, “we have been trending in the right direction. We have been getting more and more points on our academic achievement.”
Traditionally the state measures five areas, giving districts points for academics overall, for performance by at-risk subgroups, for how well prepared students are for careers and college, for attendance and for graduation rates.
Because of COVID-19, students did not take state assessment tests last year, so new academic achievement data wasn’t available. The state also decided not to consider attendance data since schools all went online in March.
With no annual performance reports to go by, state education officials lacked the usual measurement for determining district progress.
Neale said the lack of new performance data blocked the pathway to full accreditation for provisionally accredited districts such as Kansas City. “That was on our conscious,” he said.
So the state started looking for some other way to measure progress for districts that asked them to do so. One possibility, he said, would be to look at a district’s performance history coupled with how well students have done on other standardized tests. But they have not decided to do that yet.
What is certain, Neale said, “we can’t just make a decision on Kansas City absent of academic data.” And no decision at all could be the state’s conclusion. “It doesn’t mean they are good or bad. It just means there isn’t data.”
In the meantime, Bedell said, he wants the city, state lawmakers and his staff to know how well Kansas City is doing and that its progress has been recognized nationally.
Casserly said district performance is improving on several fronts, including student achievement, graduation rates and attendance.
He said the district “has also demonstrated stability and leadership within the region and nation, strengthened its financial health and implemented a comprehensive district-wide improvement plan.”
What KCPS has accomplished, Casserly said, “doesn’t happen overnight. It takes years of hard work and consistent progress to change a big city school system.
“They have made progress that suggests that Missouri should look favorably on full accreditation for Kansas City Public Schools. “
For example, four years ago KCPS graduation rate was at 68%, and now it’s 74.8%, Bedell said. When he arrived at KCPS, no students in the district were taking Advance Placement tests. Now they are given at every high school except Lincoln College Preparatory Academy, where instead students take International Baccalaureate exams. And moreover, 53% of the students taking AP tests are passing them.
Despite improvements, there’s still work to be done.
“I don’t want anyone to get anything conflicted,” Bedell said. “No, we aren’t at state averages in some areas, but what we have been doing is closing against the state every year.
“We have been able to state that we are making steady progress, contrary to the narrative that is being put out there that our kids aren’t learning.”
Still, Bedell said, if the state isn’t ready to raise the district’s accreditation status, he is ready to keep pushing toward it.
“I don’t want no handouts. I’m too competitive for that,” he said. “And I believe that we have done the work.”
