Maybe the tide really is turning!
Terry McAuliffe, the newly elected Democratic governor of Virginia, said on a radio program that he wants to end the practice of giving letter grades to schools, a practice pioneered in Florida by Jeb Bush.
McAuliffe recognized that the letter grades (which, by the way, are highly misleading, inaccurate, and unstable) have the effect of stigmatizing not only schools but entire communities:
“I don’t like this letter grade for our schools — the second you give a school an ‘F’ grade, you have stigmatized the students, the teachers, the school, the community,” McAuliffe said during his first “Ask the Governor” call-in radio show on WRVA in Richmond.
“At the end of the day you have to fund these through your local real estate taxes — if their school is an ‘F,’ I can promise you nobody is going to move into that area for that school,” he added.
“And folks that are there are going to try and move out, and some people who are under water with their mortgages have no chance so they’re stuck there.”
Mayor Bill de Blasio has already announced his intention to eliminate the letter grading of schools.
Perhaps the bipartisan consensus built around the ideology of the far-right is crumbling.
Nothing contained in NCLB or Race to the Top has improved schools.
It is time to think and plan anew.
The best place to start is to stop doing those things that actually harm students, teachers, principals, schools, and communities.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
A-F grades are great for restaurants, but not for schools or students.
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Mark Collins, in NYC, restaurants don’t get A-F grades. Almost all restaurants are graded A. A few are pending or get another letter, like a B.
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Do you really want to grade a human being the same as you grade an Egg or a Kitchen…???
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A-F grades are great for restaurants, but not for schools or students
Look at what I wrote. You see the comma?
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Oh My….Misread Mark…Apologies….Maybe I need a reading comprehension course…
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Maybe we should grade the chickens then the egg…or should we grade the eggs then the chickens..I have never figured that one out.
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Diane, refreshing news. Thanks for posting.
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http://www.hometownlife.com/article/20140130/OPINION02/301300033/Here-s-what-community-needs-to-know-about-recent-teacher-resignations
I would like you and Diane to see this. This is what happens when teachers no longer get real due process and are measured by test scores. No wonder people are leaving the profession in droves.
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By the way, this story involved autistic children who were interviewed by admin about teachers. If admin took your special ed child into an office with other admin and started asking them questions would you be very upset???? Is this what education has become in America?
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It is refreshing news. I worry that the quotes make it sound like he’s trying to cover up bad schools rather than being concerned about the problems inherent n the grading system. That could give fuel to the reformers. But he’s moving in the right direction!
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I live in Virginia. He also campaigned on raising salaries for teachers & reducing number of standardized tests (we’re non-Common Core). There is a bill in the legislature right now to reduce number of standardized tests before graduation by eight from 34 to 26. Not a transformation but a start. It has bipartisan support & is expected to pass.
McAulliff appointed U.S. Senator Tim Kaine’s (D) wife, Anne Holton, as his Secretary of Ed. She doesn’t have background in education, but was a family law judge & advocate for disadvantaged & foster children. I’m told that she & Tim Kaine sent their 3 kids to public schools in Richmond that were majority African American. They walk the walk & don’t just talk the talk.
We are hopeful in Virginia. The privatizers haven’t been able to establish a foothold in this state (with both Democratic & Republican governors). We have only 4 charter schools in the entire state. Local communities, through our school boards, have final veto power on this issue.
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Sounds like North Carolina could learn a few things from Virginia.
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I went to grad school in Chapel Hill in late ’80’s. This is not the NC that I knew – there was Jesse Helms but for the most part it was a moderate state which placed high value on education. I am shocked as to what is going on now. I don’t understand it, but then again, I don’t understand any of the “reformers.” They are greedy & selfish beyond belief.
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So how did Jeb Bush come up with his pioneering letter-grading system for schools?
Well, he grew up watching American Bandstand and Soul Train. (Jeb Just loved getting on that Soul Train).
Hey, yeah, man, it’s like, it’s totally got a beat and you can dance to it. I give it a 9!
Who would have thought that such a profound, subtle, discerning system would have such an origin?
Now you know.
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Stay tuned for more Moments in Education History sponsored by the Chiefs for Change, the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, and In-and-Out Burger. Fast food ideas served up daily.
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Actually, it worked quite well.
LOL
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Hi Diane, no system of grading schools will be perfect, nor will all produce the same results given the differences in each of them. I can tell you that low-income schools in Florida were ignored for decades by school districts run by six white folks and the token African American. And then when that failure was exposed, a huge turn of events went into action. Now you see the best principals and many top teachers in these schools. They have more resources, reading coaches, etc, etc. And you simply cannot credibly deny the progress Florida has made in raising the academic achievement level of low-income students compared to other states. I don’t know where this will end up on this string. Hopefully in the right place. Good night.
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There has been, in Florida, some improvement in FCAT and NAEP scores over time. To what might one attribute those improvements? That’s an interesting question. It seems highly unlikely that much of the effect is attributable to instituting a grotesquely overgeneralizing school grading system.
What the data show is that Florida students are now somewhat better than they were at taking FCAT and NAEP-style tests. Why? Well, one might note that preparing kids to take FCAT- and NAEP-style tests has become THE central preoccupation on the part of teachers and administrators in Florida. Training kids to take these summative tests has pushed out much of the rest of the curriculum. It’s no exaggeration to say that the tests have become an obsession. Simply taking practice tests and becoming familiar with the formats of test questions dramatically improves scores on tests of this kind, and Florida kids now do a LOT of practice tests. In such a circumstance, it would be surprising, indeed, if the scores didn’t improve. Are the students better readers? Are they better at math? Are they more intrinsically motivated to learn? Do they know more civics and history and science and music and art? What differences might one have seen in outcomes from interventions other than summative testing? In other words, what was the opportunity cost of taking the standards-and-testing approach to reform instead of many other possible approaches? Interesting questions, all.
Getting at answers to some of those questions would require looking at independent measures to establish validity. FCAT and NAEP are not independent measures, of course, because they are quite similar in format. It would be interesting to compare, for example, kids’ ability to comprehend sentences containing complex syntactic constructions then and now or the frequency of their independent reading when they leave school, then and now, but such independent data don’t exist.
Nationwide, since NCLB was instituted, scores on state tests, NAEP, and some international tests have blipped a tiny, tiny bit upward. Billions of dollars later, at the price of turning our schools into institutions for test prep, those scores have budged a tiny, tiny bit.
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You make some excellent points, Bill. Certainly, it’s important that problem schools were identified and that SOME interventions were taken. I don’t think anyone would argue with that. No one sane, that is.
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When the right thing can only be measured poorly, it tends to cause the wrong thing to be measured, only because it can be measured well. And it is often much worse to have a good measurement of the wrong thing—especially when, as is so often the case, the wrong thing will in fact be used as an indicator of the right thing—than to have poor measurements of the right things. —John Tukey, the statistician for Bell Labs and Princeton University who developed the box plot
Thanks to Don Duane Swacker, Hidalgo, for this superb citation.
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Lohvfl, the school grading system was one driver of Florida’s impressive academic gains. When Florida began including children with disabilities in its grading formula, for example, the state quickly began leading the nation in academic gains made by these children because the school were forced to focus on them. It also cut down on the labeling of children as learning disabled. There were other reforms as well. You will have to define “somewhat better.” In the 1990s, about 75 percent of Florida’s African American fourth graders read below basic. That has been cut substantially and the state is one of the leaders in gains made by these kids. NAEP is the best tool we have for measuring academic progress.
You may not like the strategies that produced these results, but you can’t deny the results.
As for all the intangibles you talk about involved in an education, I don’t disagree. But if a kid is not a competent reader and can’t do basic math, everything you talk about is a moot point because he is going to fail in life. Kids have to read. Kids have to do math. Without that foundation, nothing else matters.
That’s not to say test prep isn’t a problem.
Thanks for the opportunity to discuss.
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Would this be the same Jeb Bush whose state ranks among the top 5 in closing the poverty achievement gap? What you saw in Florida when the F;s were handed out were bureaucracies snapping to attention and upgrading the staffs and services at low-income schools that were ignored for decades by the school system you folks so slavishly worship.
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Now, all you people snap to!
Yeah, that works.
LOL
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Bill F, the A-F report cards in NYC were a joke. High-performing schools got low grades because they didn’t “improve.” Very low-performing schools got high grades for small gains produced by test prep. The public came to see them as nonsense.
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What? I like it. Common sense in a time of ridiculousness.
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One more comment, I think that Gov McAullife is one to watch on edu issues. He is BFF with Hillary Clinton (she campaigned for him in election) & if this positive trend continues, then perhaps he will have influence over her in regard to edu issues instead of Rahm in Chicago. One can only hope!
Finally, I read in newspaper that McAuliffe’s have 4 kids – 2 grown & 2 still school-aged – some went to private school but some went to public school.
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I hope it’s a positive trend and not just another step “forward”–same plan with a few tweaks and a new name.
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It’s a good start but, unfortunately, the problem goes much deeper. Corporate “reformers” fund GreatSchools, Inc., (See: http://www.greatschools.org/about/supporters.page ) which rates schools on a 1-10 scale, based solely on standardized test scores, and then Zillow, the online real estate search engine, includes the GreatSchools ratings of “nearby schools” with every listing.
Anyone see the Zillow commercial that has been airing lately, where the soldier returning home from active duty is communicating with his wife and both are looking online for a home? When the wife points out a potential house, the first thing the husband says is something like, ‘but look at the school rating,’ and then they look for and find a different home.
This looks like a contemporary approach to real estate block busting, which contributed to white flight from urban areas to the suburbs in the 60s and 70s.
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That Zillow commercial really infuriates me. It’s no different from slapping a rating on every family in America, based on their children’s standardized test scores, and hanging it the front door of each home and apartment building.
Uh oh, everybody around here is no higher than a 3. Stay away. But they are loving and caring people? Not important, the tests don’t cover silly things like affect.
This is how data-driven elites reinforce ghettos and create gated communities in areas that don’t permit actual gates. Just bring in Money-bags Bill and his posse and, Voila, invisible electric gates and fences zap intruders and keep everyone in their proper place. “Good fences make good neighbors.”
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“The best place to start is to stop doing those things that actually harm students. . . ”
Like “grading” them??????
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Is this fad over already? Ohio just paid a bundle for the dumb Florida system.
What a waste.
When do we stop paying national ed reform consultants and start putting money back into existing, local public schools?
Good for McAuliffe. The peer pressure to go along must have been enormous 🙂
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Or maybe not. It’s possible that the DC bureaucrats want a quality public school system for their own children.
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http://www.journalinquirer.com/page_one/hedge-fund-founder-buys-leadership-pipeline-in-malloy-s-office/article_3994ac24-8cf9-11e3-949d-001a4bcf887a.html?utm_content=buffer75aff&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer
This is just appalling. Hedge fund managers placing “fellows” in the Connecticut ed office.
“Mandel, a one-time Goldman Sachs analyst, became a managing director at Tiger Management, a now-closed hedge fund whose especially high returns often made headlines. Business writers as a result often have referred to him as a “tiger cub” since his founding of Lone Pine Capital in 1997.
Mandel is chairman of the board of trustees at Dartmouth College and a member of the Harvard Business School’s board of dean’s advisers as well as member of the board of directors at Teach for America, a nonprofit that recruits recent college graduates to teach in low-income communities.
Mandel last summer also became one of the biggest contributors to a federal committee run by the Connecticut Democratic State Central Committee, writing two $10,000 checks on the same day. That amounted to double the maximum allowable individual contribution, so the committee was required to return half of the money.
Mandel and his wife, Susan Z. Mandel, head the Fairfield-based Zoom, which reported assets of $586 million in its 2012 filing with the IRS.
The document listed Lowney, a Fairfield “leadership” consultant, as Zoom’s executive director. Lowney also is a member of the board of directors of the Connecticut Housing Finance Authority, a position to which Doba said she was appointed by Senate Minority Leader John McKinney, a Republican gubernatorial hopeful.
Lowney was a key figure in the brouhaha over public schools in Bridgeport in 2011 and 2012. Basically, the city’s Board of Education, stalemated and facing an $18 million budget shortfall, voted to dissolve itself, backed by what the Wall Street Journal called “well-funded outside interests.” A state-appointed board subsequently brought in a new superintendent, but the Connecticut Supreme Court in 2012 ruled that the state’s takeover was illegal and ordered a special election.”
It’s really discouraging. One wonders if it’s too late, if these folks have simply purchased our entire government.
We desperately need a discussion about the outsized influence of wealthy people in this country. It is completely out of control.
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A to F grades for schools are just as irresponsible as letter grades are for kids. They say nothing about what the school is like and, in addition, are based on artificial information. When assessing schools how about giving credit to those who recognize kids are different, brains are different and student backgrounds are different.
Then we take an approach similar to this http://savingstudents-caplee.blogspot.com/2013/12/accountability-with-honor-and-yes-we.html This focuses on individusl academic achievement but other issues of course must be considered.
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Hiding behind high-stakes testing: Meritocracy, objectivity and inequality in
U.S. education,
Wayne Au, University of Washington
http://openjournals.library.usyd.edu.au/index.php/IEJ/article/view/7453/7812
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Thanks for this sobering analysis. The public needs to see the big picture as described here. Perhaps you can repackage these thoughts in the form of a “letter to the editor” & start sending away to Fla newspapers?
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