Last month, the Cleveland Metropolitan School District achieved what it called an “unprecedented milestone.” The district earned a three-star rating on its 2023-2024 state report card, meeting state education standards for the first time. That puts CMSD ahead of Ohio’s other large urban school districts. 

District CEO Warren Morgan has celebrated the achievement while also acknowledging it will take more work to meet the district’s ultimate goal of having a high-performing school in every city neighborhood.

“This is not just an aspiration. This is real progress and achievement that is happening right here in our district,” Morgan said during his State of the Schools speech earlier this month. “We are committed to expanding these successes across our district so that every neighborhood has a school that is meeting or exceeding state standards.”

Right now, that’s not the case. During the 2023-2024 school year, more than half of CMSD’s students attended schools that fell below the state’s education standards, meaning their ratings were below three stars on their state report cards. Many of those schools were on the city’s East Side. 

Explore the map below to see 2023-2024 star ratings for each CMSD school. The colors indicate the number of overall stars. The larger the circle, the more students enrolled in a school. Click on a circle to see details on a school’s enrollment and report card scores in different categories.

Source: Building location, enrollment, and star rating information from Ohio Department of Education and Workforce. Note: Locations of schools that share buildings are modified slightly so that each school is accessible on the map. Credit: Visualization and analysis by April Urban, Signal Cleveland.

Where are CMSD’s best schools?

CMSD has 105 schools, and just under half of them earned ratings that were three stars or higher. Compared to the district’s previous report card, 27 schools improved their ratings while 29 received lower ratings.

State data also showed that there are more high-performing schools on the West Side than on the East Side. Of the 56 CMSD schools on the city’s East Side, about 70% earned fewer than three stars on the report card. Of the 48 schools on the West Side, about 38% earned fewer than three stars.

The East Side schools that did not meet state standards had significantly higher student enrollment than the schools on the West Side that did not meet state standards. 

Signal Cleveland asked to interview CMSD officials for this story. The district did not agree to set up an interview and didn’t respond to questions in time for publication. The story will be updated with any responses.

The three CMSD schools that earned five stars – the top rating –  are all located on the East Side on the John Hay Academic Campus, but they aren’t open to all students. Those schools — Cleveland Early College High School, the Cleveland School of Science and Medicine and the Cleveland School of Architecture and Design — all require applicants to have a clean attendance record, good grades, and proficient scores on their Ohio State Tests. The West Side doesn’t have any five-star schools.

CMSD has an open enrollment policy, so parents can send their children to any school in the district unless the school has admissions requirements. A Signal Cleveland analysis last year showed that about two-thirds of the district’s students did not go to school in the ZIP code they lived in.

The state report cards can efficiently gauge the academic quality of schools and districts, said Aaron Churchill, the Ohio research director at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute. The institute researches education nationwide and has a branch in Ohio. 

Report cards don’t capture the experiences of students in school, though. Things that shape the quality of life at schools such as safety, the convenience or transportation and emotional or behavioral support systems are much harder to measure than test scores, Churchill noted. 

Students’ feelings about their schools are important, he said, “but I don’t think they’re primarily what you want to base an accountability system on, sort of like a vibes-based report card. That would create some issues, I think, from a data quality perspective and an accountability perspective.”

CMSD owes its three-star rating to student growth

In addition to the overall star rating, the state gives districts and schools star ratings in five categories: achievement, progress, gap closing, early literacy and graduation. Although CMSD’s overall rating rose this year, the district’s ratings in each of the report card’s five categories remained the same.

CMSD was very close to earning a three-star rating on its 2022-2023 report card, so some minor improvements in almost every category were enough to push the district’s overall rating up. 

The district’s biggest improvements came in the progress and gap closing categories. That’s what pushed the district to three stars, according to Nicholas D’Amico, the executive director of school performance at CMSD. During a Board of Education meeting in September, D’Amico said he was surprised to see that academic growth has stayed strong even as students recover from an academic slump brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic. 

D’Amico said the difference-maker in CMSD’s star-rating increase was the progress of different student demographic groups, which include students from different racial, ethnic and economic backgrounds.

The progress and gap closing categories show how much students have grown relative to student growth statewide. A higher score in those categories means that students are growing academically at a quicker pace than their peers across the state. 

Many CMSD schools improved their star ratings in the progress and gap closing categories, but fewer improved in achievement.

• 32 schools increased their star ratings in gap closing
• 22 schools increased their ratings in progress
• Six schools increased their star ratings in the achievement
• 17 elementary schools increased their star ratings in early literacy
• Four high schools increased their star ratings in graduation

What does progress mean?

The progress category is especially important in districts like CMSD that serve under-resourced communities, Churchill said. Urban school districts usually fall behind suburban districts on graduation and achievement, he said. 

It’s hard to pin down exactly why, but it has to do with economic and social challenges students and their families face outside the classroom. Those external factors impact the achievement category, but not the progress and gap closing categories, he said. In progress and gap closing, students are competing with their own previous test scores. 

“The progress component is a really important marker of academic quality,” Churchill said. “That’s something we want to see, especially in our urban schools. That measure really does give them a chance to shine.”

On the other hand, Churchill said, students need to be able to read and understand math. CMSD scored two stars in the achievement category based on students’ state test results. The district also scored 1 star in early literacy. About 35% of CMSD’s third graders passed their state reading tests. 

“There is really an urgency to make sure that all kids, including all kids in Cleveland, can do math and reading,” Churchill said. “It might take them more time, it might take them more resources and tutoring and that sort of thing, but at the end of the day, we really do need to make sure that every kid in Ohio can achieve graduation standards and take the next step in life.”

Signal Cleveland’s April Urban created data visualizations and contributed to the data analysis.

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