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IASA’s 5Essentials letter to State Superintendent Dr. Koch
Friday, August 2, 2013
Dear Dr. Koch,
I am writing on behalf of the Illinois Association of School Administrators (IASA) Board of Directors to request
that you consider delaying the public reporting of the 5Essentials Survey until next year and use this first
year’s results to formulate a statewide baseline, and also to give ISBE time to improve the survey itself in
order to make the results more relevant to school districts and to the public.
We are not calling for a repeal of the survey. We are simply asking for time to allow stakeholders and ISBE to
work together to make the survey a product that would yield more credible data, thereby making the
information more valid for school districts to consider going forward in an attempt to make improvements.
We appreciate your decision to re-score the survey using statewide data as a benchmark instead of trying to
compare all schools throughout the state to the Chicago Public Schools. In terms of demographics -- including
size and socio-economic status – one simply cannot compare CPS to all other schools in our very diverse
state. Our representatives on the advisory panel questioned from the start that approach by the statisticians
from the University of Chicago, and we are encouraged by ISBE’s decision on this issue.
While having a more reliable benchmark would be an important improvement, our Board and other
superintendents have identified some other issues from this first round of surveys that we think merit further
consideration. Those issues include:
The security of the survey.
We are aware of instances where the percentage of responses was greater
than 100 percent – even after corrections were made to the number of potential respondents. Unless the
survey is secure in terms of who was able to fill them out and how many times a particular person could fill
out the survey, the results are simply not credible. The approach that individual districts could invalidate its
results if it could prove some sort of fraud places the burden on the wrong party. Those who are
conducting the survey should have the responsibility to prove that their survey is secure because they are
the ones who know how the security for the survey was designed. School administrators are not trained to
be investigators and they have far too many other items on their plate this time of year to be investigating
security issues with this survey.
The scoring of results.
The conclusions do not appear to match up with the actual results. For example,
in many instances cited, a very high percentage of responses (above 85 percent and even 100 percent in
some cases) were “Strongly Agree” or “Agree” – both positive answers – but because not enough
responses were in the “Strongly Agree” category the end result was a school being labeled “Neutral” or
“Weak” in a category.
We are told that probably is the result of scoring on a bell curve, which inherently creates “winners” and
“losers.” Regardless, the results are undermined and become invalid when “Agree” ends up being counted
as a negative response because the respondent clearly was “agreeing” with a statement not knowing that
“Strongly Agrees” actually was the only answer that would count as a positive response.
Some of the survey questions are unclear or set up for failure.
For example, questions about parental
visits to classrooms simply do not apply in many cases, especially in high schools. For that matter, given
today’s safety concerns do we even want lots of parents in the school buildings when many schools
already are struggling with security concerns?
Some schools, like Pittsfield High School, operate on a Block 8 system, meaning classes meet every other
day. How is a math question where the best response is “We do this most every day” valid for a class that
doesn’t even meet every day?
Similarly, as Dr. Chris Clark of Zion-Benton Township High School District 126 mentioned in her letter to
you, how can a principal of a very large school be expected to know what’s going on in every classroom?
(Continued on page 5)
