Decile ranking – whether to continue reporting it or not – remains a hot topic for the Unionville-Chadds Ford School Board. Directors spent two hours of a four-hour meeting mulling over the issue with no resolution during their March 15 work session.

The board is scheduled to vote on the matter during its March 28 meeting.

Decile rankings compare students to others in their class using a scale of 1 to 10. A ranking of 1 indicates a student is in the top 10 percent of the class, a ranking of 5 indicates a student in the top 50 percent.

The district administration has proposed doing away with reporting the rankings because it said most colleges and universities don’t bother with them or don’t require them.

Superintendent John Sanville said that when the issue first surfaced last year, he didn’t see any reason to make a policy change until the administration started doing the research.

“That’s when I was convinced that it’s the right thing to do,” Sanville said.

He added that only the military academies and some high-end medical schools that allow students to begin medical training right after high school require rankings, and he said the service academies require the specific class ranking, not a decile.

Ken Batchelor, the assistant to the superintendent, headed the committee that recommended the policy change. The committee looked at high schools across the country and 27 colleges.

“Some of the colleges were surprised that we still rank,” Batchelor said.

He said that the emphasis on decile rankings as part of the admission process has declined. In 1993, 43 percent of colleges wanted those rankings, but by 2012 that was down to 19 percent.

He cited a report from Adlai E. Stevenson High School in Illinois as one of the reasons for the recommendation. That school stopped reporting the rankings in 2005 after going through the same process U-CFSD is going through now.

Batchelor said Stevenson went to the state schools and large universities, with a list of students, some of whom had been accepted and others rejected when rankings were provided, and asked those schools to review them again without ranking this time.

The result, he said, was that more students would have been accepted if ranking had not been a factor.

During the Feb. 22 meeting, School Board Directors Gregg Lindner and Michael Rock went on record as wanting to drop reporting the rankings while others, such as Elise Anderson and Bob Sage, have said they see both advantages and disadvantages.

This month, Sage said some research suggests about 15 percent of the colleges said they place a great amount of emphasis on decile rankings as an admission factor, 35 percent place a moderate amount.

“The rest of the 50 percent are either low or none,” Sage said.

Director John Murphy asked questions to put the discussion in context: “Without providing the decile, how do colleges see the value of the GPA that our students earn? How does a 4.1 at Unionville compare to a 5.2 at Conestoga?”

Board President Vic Dupuis, who attended the meeting remotely from Florida, said he had come full circle in his thinking, that he initially accepted the administration’s recommendation.

“There was a lot of logic. But then I began listening to several community members [who want to keep the reporting] and started to go the other way because I heard the emotional frustration of the top decile parent as they expressed concerns about the loss of recognition,” Dupuis said.

“But as I continue to read the literature…provided by both sides and, as I’ve done some of my own research…I don’t hear a compelling argument that there is damage by eliminating the decile rankings for the top decile; I’m not seeing something being taken away from the top decile,” he said.

Dupuis added that he’s only seeing potential harm to students who are not in the top decile by continuing to report the rankings. What ultimately matters, he said, are a student’s grade-point-average, entrance exam scores, college essays and extra-curricular activities.

Rock, a professor at Bryn Mawr College, said he spoke with admissions officers at Bryn Mawr, Swarthmore, and Haverford, and all told him that it’s “the norm that schools no longer rank. We have to cope with that, rest assured, that Unionville students will not be discriminated against because we don’t do ranking,” he said.

Director Carolyn Daniels said colleges should see “some markers, some context” of how a grade-point-average compares from one school to another.

Murphy said he’s heard from constituents who say the rankings should not be removed without something taking their place.

One possibility is that of a distribution. Sanville said one type of distribution could be reporting the grade-point-average with a percentage of how many students fall within a given grade range, such as 27 percent had an A average and so forth.

The proposed police change may be amended before the March 28 meeting to include some sort of distribution.

Other business

• The board will vote next month on awarding bids for renovation work at Charles F. Patton Middle School. According to Supervisor of Building and Grounds Rick Hostetler, general construction, mechanical and electrical improvements and roofing will cost $2.34 million. The district had budgeted $2.225 million.

•Directors will also be considering extending the Chrome Book pilot program to all sixth-, seventh- and eighth-grade students. Several options are being considered.
One option would be to give the portable computers to students at no cost, but Batchelor said that would add about $239,000 to the budget. Another option would be to charge a fee of $75 per year for the Chrome Books. Students would be able to take them home after school and in the summer, and then own them after 3 ½ years.