Three schools make worst list

By Cindy Landrum  

JANUARY 19, 2012 1:56 p.m. (0)

An online ranking that put three Greenville County middle schools among the nation’s 100 worst schools is bogus, a Greenville County Schools’ spokesman said this week.

NeighborhoodScout, a website for potential home buyers that includes crime statistics, school performance and real estate appreciation rates, listed Lakeview, Berea and Woodmont middle schools on its list of the country’s worst schools.

One Greenville County charter school, Wohali Academy, made the list. The school ceased operation at the end of December 2009.

“This for-profit business is both irresponsible and deceptive in using contrived, invalid methods to create “bogus” rankings across the nation,” said Jason McCreary, Greenville County Schools’ director of research, evaluation, accountability and testing.

The NeighborhoodScout website said it uses a patent-pending methodology to standardize state test scores for national comparison purposes. The methodology uses a combination of state No Child Left Behind scores and National Assessment of Educational Progress results.

McCreary said in an email statement that methods exist to allow comparisons to be made across multiple test scores when at least one test is constant across all students.

“Unfortunately, this company does not utilize any one of those methods,” he said. “Their intent is clearly for their own personal profit at the expense of students, communities and schools.”

NeighborhoodScout charges $39.95 per month to get full reports.

In an email response, NeighborhoodScout founder Andrew Schuller said because states were able to formulate their own No Child Left Behind test, the test is not truly standardized. The National Assessment of Educational Progress is standardized, but not all students in every state take it.

Schuller said NeighborhoodScout’s system calculates each state’s gap value ­– or the difference between the percentage of students passing the state-specific NCLB test and the NAEP. The state-specific gap value is added to each school’s NCLB proficiency percentages to produce an adjusted school-specific score. All schools are then ranked relative to one another nationwide.

Of the 100 schools on NeighborhoodScout’s worst school list, 74 are in South Carolina.

Schools in Massachusetts, the state in which the website’s owner, Location, Inc., is based, dominate NeighborhoodScout’s 100 best schools list.

Spartanburg County School District 6 Superintendent Darryl Owings said the district is pursing legal remedies to get Dorman High School’s freshman campus off the list. Owings said the district was able to prove the ranking was inaccurate two years ago and was based on test scores for only eight of the campus’ more than 850 students.

Schuller could not be reached for comment.

South Carolina Department of Education spokesman Jay Ragley said he was unaware of the list and has asked the department’s statisticians to look into the rankings.

Lakeview, Berea and Woodmont middle schools have all shown improvement on their state report cards.

Woodmont Middle’s state report card grade has been average for the past three years, up from at-risk in 2007. The school is one of the district’s middle years baccalaureate sites.

Berea Middle’s report card grade is average and the school has been recognized as one of the state’s closing the gap schools. Closing the gap schools are those making significant progress in closing the gap in the performance of students in different demographic groups.

Lakeview Middle also has an average report card grade.