Mark GiaQuinta, a member of the Fort Wayne school board, responded to a local columnist with a searing critique of the state’s A-F grading system.
I think you will enjoy Mark’s insightful comments:
Matt:
Thanks for the article posted above. I appreciate your statement in the article that you view the DaHaan charter school as, “stellar” and “amazing” despite its “C” grade. That has been my and others’ point all along. It may very well be stellar, amazing, etc. and still get a C. In fact, it may be all those things even had it receive a “D” or an “F”. The point Tony just could not grasp is that these grades mean so darn little. The school should be evaluated based in part on the standardized assessments but there must be recognition of the challenges faced by the school, the quality of parental involvement, the demographic of the school, the extent of the language barrier in the school, the leadership in the building, the extra-curricular programs, and the willingness and ability of the staff to coordinate the learning experience to bring out the student’s best.
This story leaves me amused, frustrated and angry all at the same time. Amused for obvious reasons – how could anyone with a Ph.D think these really dumb statements would stay secret. Frustrated because I know that the money in the system will continue to influence legislators that the A-F system improves education. But most of all I am angry. South Side High School missed a “C” by one lousy point on this phony grading scale. Many other of our FWCS schools are in the same boat. South Side is not a “D” High School; it is stellar, amazing and deserving of praise. It never received that praise because Tony and the gutless wonders who worked for him (and who should have stood up to him) fixed the system.
I will announce soon that our Board will no longer recognize our schools on the basis of the letter grade assigned by the State. I will apologize for not having taken a stand against the letter grades when we were awarded an “A” (which fell to a “C” as part of the DaHaan grade inflation). We will do what we should have done a long time ago. We will develop our own metrics and award those stellar, amazing schools that work miracles in the lives of our students, regardless of the pay to play designation awarded by the State.
I will continue to take issue with your use of the word “reform” to describe the Bennett policies. Reform connotes improvement that has been proven. The policies initiated by Tony have not reformed anything yet. They have made a lot of people a lot of money. There may come a time when the results of these policies warrant the use of that term, but that day has yet to arrive. Until then, the policies are merely experiments. And if they fail, there will be a lot of young people who will have paid a dear price for Tony’s bluster.
Again, thanks for the article.
Mark E. GiaQuinta, Esq.
HALLER & COLVIN, P.C.
444 East Main Street
Fort Wayne, Indiana
E-mail: mgiaquinta@hallercolvin.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I sincerely hope that Mark GiaQuinta stays in office! The students and teachers in his district are lucky to have him!
I agree ! ! !
“The school should be evaluated based in part on the standardized assessments. . . ”
NO, Mark, evaluating the teacher, school and/or district with standardized assessments that are designed to “measure” (and they don’t do that well at all because they are logical fallacies) let’s say a students fifth grade math skills/abilities/knowledge can only be ETHICALLY used to say something about the interaction of the student and the particulary assessing device. It is UNETHICAL to use the results of any standardized assessment device to assess anything other than for what they were designed.
To understand the inherent errors that render educational standards, standardized testing and the grading of students/teachers/schools completely invalid read and understand Noel Wilson’s “Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” found at:
http://epaa.asu.edu/ojs/article/view/577/700
Brief outline of Wilson’s “Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” and some comments of mine. (updated 6/24/13 per Wilson email)
1. A quality cannot be quantified. Quantity is a sub-category of quality. It is illogical to judge/assess a whole category by only a part (sub-category) of the whole. The assessment is, by definition, lacking in the sense that “assessments are always of multidimensional qualities. To quantify them as one dimensional quantities (numbers or grades) is to perpetuate a fundamental logical error” (per Wilson). The teaching and learning process falls in the logical realm of aesthetics/qualities of human interactions. In attempting to quantify educational standards and standardized testing we are lacking much information about said interactions.
2. A major epistemological mistake is that we attach, with great importance, the “score” of the student, not only onto the student but also, by extension, the teacher, school and district. Any description of a testing event is only a description of an interaction, that of the student and the testing device at a given time and place. The only correct logical thing that we can attempt to do is to describe that interaction (how accurately or not is a whole other story). That description cannot, by logical thought, be “assigned/attached” to the student as it cannot be a description of the student but the interaction. And this error is probably one of the most egregious “errors” that occur with standardized testing (and even the “grading” of students by a teacher).
3. Wilson identifies four “frames of reference” each with distinct assumptions (epistemological basis) about the assessment process from which the “assessor” views the interactions of the teaching and learning process: the Judge (think college professor who “knows” the students capabilities and grades them accordingly), the General Frame-think standardized testing that claims to have a “scientific” basis, the Specific Frame-think of learning by objective like computer based learning, getting a correct answer before moving on to the next screen, and the Responsive Frame-think of an apprenticeship in a trade or a medical residency program where the learner interacts with the “teacher” with constant feedback. Each category has its own sources of error and more error in the process is caused when the assessor confuses and conflates the categories.
4. Wilson elucidates the notion of “error”: “Error is predicated on a notion of perfection; to allocate error is to imply what is without error; to know error it is necessary to determine what is true. And what is true is determined by what we define as true, theoretically by the assumptions of our epistemology, practically by the events and non-events, the discourses and silences, the world of surfaces and their interactions and interpretations; in short, the practices that permeate the field. . . Error is the uncertainty dimension of the statement; error is the band within which chaos reigns, in which anything can happen. Error comprises all of those eventful circumstances which make the assessment statement less than perfectly precise, the measure less than perfectly accurate, the rank order less than perfectly stable, the standard and its measurement less than absolute, and the communication of its truth less than impeccable.”
In other word all the errors involved in the process render any conclusions invalid.
5. The test makers/psychometricians, through all sorts of mathematical machinations attempt to “prove” that these tests (based on standards) are valid-errorless or supposedly at least with minimal error [they aren’t]. Wilson turns the concept of validity on its head and focuses on just how invalid the machinations and the test and results are. He is an advocate for the test taker not the test maker. In doing so he identifies thirteen sources of “error”, any one of which renders the test making/giving/disseminating of results invalid. As a basic logical premise is that once something is shown to be invalid it is just that, invalid, and no amount of “fudging” by the psychometricians/test makers can alleviate that invalidity.
6. Having shown the invalidity, and therefore the unreliability, of the whole process Wilson concludes, rightly so, that any result/information gleaned from the process is “vain and illusory”. In other words start with an invalidity, end with an invalidity (except by sheer chance every once in a while, like a blind and anosmic squirrel who finds the occasional acorn, a result may be “true”) or to put in more mundane terms shit in-crap out.
7. And so what does this all mean? I’ll let Wilson have the second to last word: “So what does a test measure in our world? It measures what the person with the power to pay for the test says it measures. And the person who sets the test will name the test what the person who pays for the test wants the test to be named.”
In other words it measures “’something’ and we can specify some of the ‘errors’ in that ‘something’ but still don’t know [precisely] what the ‘something’ is.” The whole process harms many students as the social rewards for some are not available to others who “don’t make the grade (sic)” Should American public education have the function of sorting and separating students so that some may receive greater benefits than others, especially considering that the sorting and separating devices, educational standards and standardized testing, are so flawed not only in concept but in execution?
My answer is NO!!!!!
One final note with Wilson channeling Foucault and his concept of subjectivization:
“So the mark [grade/test score] becomes part of the story about yourself and with sufficient repetitions becomes true: true because those who know, those in authority, say it is true; true because the society in which you live legitimates this authority; true because your cultural habitus makes it difficult for you to perceive, conceive and integrate those aspects of your experience that contradict the story; true because in acting out your story, which now includes the mark and its meaning, the social truth that created it is confirmed; true because if your mark is high you are consistently rewarded, so that your voice becomes a voice of authority in the power-knowledge discourses that reproduce the structure that helped to produce you; true because if your mark is low your voice becomes muted and confirms your lower position in the social hierarchy; true finally because that success or failure confirms that mark that implicitly predicted the now self evident consequences. And so the circle is complete.”
In other words students “internalize” what those “marks” (grades/test scores) mean, and since the vast majority of the students have not developed the mental skills to counteract what the “authorities” say, they accept as “natural and normal” that “story/description” of them. Although paradoxical in a sense, the “I’m an “A” student” is almost as harmful as “I’m an ‘F’ student” in hindering students becoming independent, critical and free thinkers. And having independent, critical and free thinkers is a threat to the current socio-economic structure of society
This deserves a “Thank you for posting.” I’ve digested it several times now. Thanks.
You’re Welcome!
Ol’ Alonzo Quijano would be happy to know that Don Quixote’s quests do sometimes ring true and that others wwould begin to see the world as he does!