Ohio is introducing a new category to the school report card rating system, and Cleveland schools officials say the district won’t score well in it, at least initially.
The new category is called “College, Career, Workforce and Military Readiness.” It’s a measure of how well districts prepare students for life after high school.
The state has reported data on this measure for a few years, but it will count towards districts’ overall ratings starting with the 2024-2025 school report cards. The state gathers data about each school and district and issues report cards for the previous school year each fall.
The Cleveland Metropolitan School District (CMSD) will score one star out of five in the new post-secondary category, District CEO Warren Morgan said at a recent school board meeting.
“It’s something that can impact what our overall state report card rating is going to be, so this is one of the things we have our eye on,” Morgan said.
How will the low readiness score impact CMSD’s overall report card rating?
CMSD earned a three-star overall report card rating for the 2023-2024 school year, with officials calling it an “unprecedented milestone.” For now, it’s unclear whether the district’s low score in the post-secondary readiness category will drop CMSD’s overall rating, said Communications Officer Jon Benedict.
“The exact degree and the exact manner that factors in, we’re still learning,” Benedict said. “We’re still learning what our other scores are.”
CMSD’s students are showing growth in other areas this year, he said. Early data from this year’s state tests have been promising, with CMSD high school students scoring better in math and reading.
Factoring the readiness category into districts’ overall report card ratings means every other category will count a little less than they did in previous years. CMSD’s highest score for the 2023-2024 school year was four stars in the progress category, which shows how much students have grown relative to student growth statewide.
That year, progress counted for roughly 28% of the overall score. For the 2024-2025 report card, progress will count for 25%, according to a CMSD presentation.
How does the state track students’ post-secondary readiness?
The College, Career, Workforce and Military Readiness category tracks data for different kinds of pathways to careers after high school. It aims to measure how prepared students are for life after graduation.
The state has 11 different ways it tracks students’ readiness for this category. Basically, the more students who have done things to get ready for graduation, the higher the rating in this category for schools and districts. The state counts a student as “ready” if they enroll in apprenticeship programs, enlist in the military, earn an honors diploma, and score high on college entrance exams, among other things.
In the 2023-2024 school year, CMSD’s strongest metric for post-secondary readiness was the number of students earning credentials in specific industries — such as a first aid certification or a training in customer service. Roughly 15% of CMSD students had earned enough credentials to count toward the district’s score.
But even that metric, as well as CMSD’s overall readiness score, lagged behind Ohio’s other large urban school districts: Columbus, Cincinnati, Toledo, Akron, Dayton, Canton and Youngstown.
The state deemed roughly 27% of CMSD’s roughly 2,400 graduating high school students as “ready” in the 2023-2024 school year. Ohio’s other large urban districts all had nearly double that number or higher, with Akron at a high of 76%.
Most of those districts, including Cleveland, reported no students enlisting in the military or completing an apprenticeship. For CMSD, that’s partly due to poor data collection, Chief Academic Officer Selena Florence said in a recent school board meeting.
“The systems were not put in place to be able to collect all of the data that we should have,” she said.
Moving forward, CMSD officials are hoping to increase the district’s rating in a few different ways. They’ve already put a new data collection procedure in place, Florence said. They’re also putting together a career and technical education curriculum for all high schools and working college entrance exam prep into school days, she said.