The site calls this the Instructional Spending Allocation Index, which measures the proportion of increased spending over time allocated for instruction and provides a way to track money raised with the intent of improving student performance. The portion of new dollars for instruction in Washington area school districts in 2002 ranged from 104.8 percent in the District, which Web site officials said spent all of its new money and then some extra from other sources on school performance, to 52.6 percent in Prince William County.
That index and other data developed by Standard & Poor's should be handled with care, the Web site says. It includes a warning from former North Carolina governor James B. Hunt, one of the leaders of the national school improvement movement and a member of a Standard & Poor's advisory board, that "these ratios should not be used alone to draw conclusions about education performance."
Kenneth Bernstein, a teacher at Prince George's County's Eleanor Roosevelt High School, said he thought that statement odd. "For all the warnings by Hunt and others not to use the data for comparisons, what do they expect, when the only really new thing they offer is precisely that data?" he asked.
Officials from Standard & Poor's School Evaluation Services said they first tried out the data collection and presentation system in Michigan and Pennsylvania, and some school district leaders were not happy being identified as spending more per pupil with less impressive results than their neighbors. But some educators said the information can help them focus their resources where they are most needed.
"By using SchoolMatters to identify schools with successful practices, principals can adjust instructional methods to further student achievement and help drive overall school improvement," said Brian Glades, principal of Fisher Elementary School in Redford, Mich.
Montgomery County parent John Hoven said the Web site was on the right track. "It doesn't deliver what it promises, but it could easily do so," he said.
He said the Web site recognizes that any fair comparison of schools must account for differences in student demographics, and it shows how easily this can be done with a simple graph called a scatterplot, which illustrates various patterns and relationships. But the Web site does not yet include a procedure for users to create their own scatterplots to compare school districts or ask such questions as whether higher spending, more rigorous standards or smaller class sizes raise student achievement.
Web site officials said that because Maryland is using new state tests, it is more difficult to get a true sense of the improvement in its schools over time than it is in Virginia and the District, which have been giving the same annual tests to all students for several years.
