Washington County students will be nothing more than a number to the Ohio Department of Education this upcoming school year.
To track trends in proficiency testing, each of the Ohio’s 1.8 million public school students will be assigned an identification number to be linked with his or her state test scores and personal information such as age, ethnicity and gender.
The tracking system is intended “to measure patterns of student progress” and provide Ohio accountability for its students, said Education Department spokesman J.C. Benton.
But some local teachers and students are wary of the latest data to be gathered by the state and how it will be used.
“All they are going to do is look at our school by numbers and say you’re not doing your, job, but they don’t know what’s going on in the classroom,” Marietta sixth-grade teacher Dion Prunty said.
Prunty said she agrees schools should gather information on student performance, but not at the state level. At the state level, the scores are unfairly compared among Ohio’s 612 public schools, Prunty said.
“I think its something that should be looked at locally,” Prunty said. “When they first started the proficiency tests they said it would never be used against us. They’re now telling us what to teach and before it’s too long, they’re going to tell us how to teach.”
Prunty said she fears the state will rely too heavily on the statistics and pressure teachers to teach solely upon raising those statistics.
Benton said the state would not be issuing mandates based on the statistics, but he did say the state would use the statistics to perhaps start aid programs in trouble areas for students. For example, past years of low proficiency reading scores spurred the OhioReads campaign, Benton said.
Marietta High School senior Nick Benson said he is disappointed to see the state continue to put so much attention toward proficiency tests and scores.
“I think they need to quit focusing on standardized tests and putting people into groups,” Benson said. He said his teachers “face unnecessary pressure from the tests.”
“They are forced to teach to the test if they want to look good… (or) if they don’t teach to the test, the scores make them look like bad teachers,” Benson said.
The American Civil Liberties Union is also not so thrilled with the Ohio’s new statistic tracking system. It has requested all public information on the program and said it does not like the idea of state government having access to personal information and individual test scores.
Benton said a New York company, PwC Consulting is helping manage the processing of the information, for a fee of $1.25 million. He said high security features are used to keep the information private from the accounting company.
Private schools in Ohio are not required to send in the personal information.