Cleveland Metropolitan School District officials say, for the first time in its history, the district is meeting state standards overall on Ohio’s annual report card ratings.
CEO Warren Morgan – who’s now in his second year with the district - said in an interview Friday that this is the district's best overall performance going back to the inception of the state grading school districts' performance. CMSD was also the highest-scoring this year of Ohio’s “urban 8” school districts - Akron, Canton, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Columbus, Dayton, Toledo and Youngstown.
“Great work from not only the district-level team, but really our schools, our teachers really doubling down on the instructional work that they're doing in their classroom, (and) our students and our families; it’s truly is a collective, where they allowed us to get across the finish line for this historic moment," Morgan said.
The district’s overall score is three out of five stars on the state’s grading scale. That’s a half star higher than it was last year. Three stars means a school is meeting state expectations.
However, CMSD still has one-out-of-five-star ratings on two important measures: early literacy, which measures young children’s ability to read and how much it improves over time, and graduation rates.
The district’s improvement on the report card was due to its scores rising on the “gap-closing” and “progress” measures. Those measures look at how well a district is catching up students who are behind and how well it is reducing achievement gaps between specific student groups, like students of color and students with disabilities.
About two-thirds of schools at CMSD improved their test scores overall, while a similar margin improved their “progress” scores, Morgan said. He added that CMSD’s scores include a handful of local charter schools that partner with the district; CMSD shares some levy funding with them. The number of charter schools meeting state standards increased too, he said.
Morgan said two concrete things that might have helped push the district forward last year were individual school buildings setting concrete goals for the end of the year and testing students throughout the year to see how they were progressing.
More work to do
Morgan said the district is in the middle of a developing a long-term plan to address longstanding issues - student experiences and achievement varying widely across buildings. CMSD had three school buildings that achieved five-star ratings last year including the Cleveland Early College High School on the John Hay High School campus. Meanwhile, buildings like East Tech High School and Glenville High School received two out of five stars; the lowest-rated high school was John F. Kennedy High School, with 1.5 stars overall.
“We want to ensure that every school, every neighborhood, every scholar has access to a high-quality education,” Morgan said. “So when we think about the future CMSD, we want to continue to double down on equity.”
The district’s average graduation rate across buildings sits at 77%; at some schools, it’s as low as 55%. On the early literacy front, just 35.8% of third-grade students were marked as “proficient” in reading.
Finally, half of all CMSD students – 51.5% - were considered “chronically absent” last year; chronic absenteeism is defined by the state as missing at least 10% of class time each year.
Morgan said the district is trying to offer incentives to students to attend school while also notifying parents when their children are absent.
Urban school districts across Ohio and across the country have long struggled with these issues, which were made worse by pandemic-related school closures. Socioeconomic disparities have long been associated with children’s poorer performance in schools. Urban school districts serve the highest number of students living in poverty along with large numbers of students with disabilities.
"We often hear that our schools are failing. That is not the case. It's not true," Morgan said, hitting back against a common criticism of urban school districts. "Our schools are not failing; we're meeting state standards and our kids are working hard."
Issues with the data?
An alert in red sits at the top of CMSD’s report card page on the Ohio Department of Education website, proclaiming there were issues with the data CMSD submitted that could affect its score.
The issue stems from a “testing irregularity” at only one classroom in one school last year, Morgan said, and does not affect the district’s overall score.
"They've been conferring with our data department to validate it, going back and forth for validating," Morgan said. "So this (test score) is absolutely true."
Data from school districts is self-reported to the state, said Ohio Department of Education spokesperson Lacey Snoke, and it's each district's responsibility to submit its data accurately. Districts can choose to flag it if there is an issue with the data, resulting in the alert in question.
