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District staffer presents dissertation findings: Pennsylvania leaders value strong accountability but urge more context and broader measures
Summary
Dr. Michael Godoy presented research from his dissertation showing Pennsylvania district leaders support strong accountability but want metrics that better account for context and measure postsecondary readiness and dispositions.
Dr. Michael Godoy summarized findings from his doctoral dissertation, a quasi‑qualitative study of 30 Pennsylvania school districts, and told the Carlisle Area School District education committee that district leaders generally support strong federal and state accountability while also viewing current dashboards and indices as incomplete measures of a school’s full mission.
Godoy said the study sampled 30 districts chosen across tertiles of economic disadvantage and combined interviews with Likert‑style questions. “Strong accountability at the state and federal level, they felt, is critical for public school districts,” Godoy reported, while also noting leaders said current indices capture “a small slice of what the full mission of a school is.” He told the committee superintendents valued measures that look toward students’ futures—graduation rates, postsecondary transitions and industry credentials—while distrusting measures they saw as inauthentic or heavily dependent on local resources (for example, raw counts of AP/IB courses).
Across interviews, participants raised concerns that some publicly displayed metrics correlate strongly with socioeconomic status and can, if shown without context, create misunderstanding and harm a school’s reputation. Godoy quoted a superintendent describing repeated red flags on a dashboard as a “yearly black eye” when readers lack context.
Leaders told Godoy they want new measures that reflect dispositions (work ethic, perseverance), safety and work‑based learning experiences, though they warned such measures are difficult to quantify and compare across districts. Many superintendents also emphasized the need to distinguish between measuring “how students are doing” and measuring “what a school contributes,” and urged accountability systems to accommodate context such as funding, transiency and specialized programs.
Godoy said the study’s participants found the Future Ready Index an improvement over older purely test‑score models because it provides shared language for goal‑setting, but they urged transparency about what the measures do and do not show. He said the most frequent communication challenge leaders cited was lack of time and public channels to explain nuanced data to community members.
Board members praised Godoy’s work and drew connections between the study’s recommendations and the district’s ongoing dashboard project. Godoy said networking with 30 district leaders across Pennsylvania was a research highlight and reinforced Carlisle’s approach to contextualizing metrics in community conversations.
No board action was required; the presentation was informational.
