The Connecticut Department of Education has announced new indicators for how it will evaluate schools beyond test scores alone, including indicators that judge schools on how physically fit students are.

The Department announced the Next Generation Accountability System (NGAS) which will include 12 indicators for which it will evaluate its schools.

"The 12 indicators include three ways of measuring graduation rates — whether freshmen are on track to graduate and the four-year cohort graduation rate for all students and six-year cohort graduation rate for high needs students — as well as achievement on state assessments. The NGAS also looks at how a cohort grows academically, post-graduation career preparedness and college enrollment, the percentage of chronically absent students, physical fitness and access to arts,” said the New Haven Register.

Imma Canelli, New Haven’s deputy superintendent of curriculum and instruction, consulted with the state to provide feedback for the new system and praised it for representing the “whole child,” said the Register.

"Canelli knows New Haven struggles with chronic absenteeism, when students miss more than 10 percent of all days of instruction, but the district is working to eradicate it with its Attendance Matters campaign. Additionally, she said, the focus on arts and physical education can help draw a correlation between students’ physical fitness and creative thinking and their success academically.”

Connecticut is not the only state that is adding these kinds of nonacademic measures to how it evaluates schools.

According to the New York Times, many states across the country are looking to add such measures to their evaluations due to the new federal education law which requires "at least one nonacademic measure in judging school performance”

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Article by Nicole Gorman, Education World Contributor

3/3/2016