Forget about test scores! There are better ways to determine whether your child is in a failing school or school district.
Randy Turner, a former teacher, posted a handy, short guide for parents to recognize failure.
Here is number one:
“In these days of Common Core State Standards and continuing attacks on public education by billionaires and their bought-and-paid-for legislators, parents need a few guidelines on how to tell if their child is in a failing school district.
“It has nothing to do with low scores on state-mandated standardized tests and more to do with the culture in the school district.
“Here are 10 signs that your child is in a failing school district:
1. The large majority of your teachers have less than five years of experience- The best schools have solid veteran teaching forces, mixing in talented newcomers each year as teachers retire or move into administration or other job opportunities. When you run off your veteran teachers, you not only do not have teachers who can mentor the younger staff members and help them reach their full potential, but you also are increasing the odds that you are going to hire some less gifted teachers just to fill the vacancies. That makes it that much harder to understand why so many state legislatures are appropriating millions for inexperienced Teach for America instructors instead of spending that money to keep their best teachers in the classroom.”
Open the link and read on to learn what the other nine are.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Most of those 10 indicators describe so many “well-developed” (formerly A) schools these days that play along with superintendent and quality reviewer recommendations, and generally try to game as much as they can to maintain their QR levels.
Great piece. He should do more of these for parents. We’re given such a narrow range of information and ways to think about this, because the current ed reform agenda so dominates the debate. I agree with him that school boards have to get much more savvy and skeptical as far as “consultants” who are really just about pushing product.
Spot on!!!
I hate the word “data”. It has been totally corrupted and it can be manipulated. I spoke with one of the last 5 principals in as many years that I had at the same school about behavior issues and I was told that the data did not support what I was saying. Hello??!!! I’ve worked here for years and lived it. Not all information is put into the “data” for obvious reasons. Nobody wants to look bad.
One of my least favorite, but often ;repeated experiences during my last few years in the classroom were the meetings in which principals would celebrate the improved behavior of students, by citing data which showed that referrals were down in all areas. How they had the nerve to do this when they were discouraging teachers from writing referrals and the teachers were facing more classroom disruptions than ever before, I do not know. You are absolutely correct about the manipulation of this data.
Ms. Cartwheel Librarian and Randy Turner: while the fanboys/fangirls of Dr. Raj Chetty see nothing but Campbell’s Conjecture through the fog of $tudent $ucce$$, you remind us of Campbell’s Law. Also articulated before him by Charles Goodhart as:
“When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.”
Just one example from my experience, and just from my stint as a SpecED TA: the specter of carrying weapons like knives at the HS I worked at looked very different from the POV of the students and security guards I talked with than what the school officially admitted. On the ground: a predictable given, often described by students and security guards as students feelings they had to arm themselves to protect themselves from other students that were armed and dangerous; from admins and a police officer I listened and talked to, it was just such a bother writing up and following up and dealing with such issues, and besides, it would ruin the school’s magnet programs because it would discourage the parents of “good” students (aka standardized test raisers) from enrolling at the school because it would make the place look dangerous.
Rheephorm: cowardice and laziness and prevarication writ large.
But remember: the problems arising from data corruption are all on teachers and other lowly staff.
Sure. And a la Michelle Rhee, I’ll see you a 13th percentile of “my” students [pesky co-teacher be gone!] and raise you to a 90th!
Go figure…
😎
11) The building principal is a twenty something with less than five years of actual classroom teaching experience.
12) A significant % of teacher’s cars have a bobble head of Charlotte Danielson (or Robert Marzano) on the dash board.
Drivers can be heard singing as they leave the school parking lot:
I don’t care if a
Semi’s in my blind spot
As long as I have my
Plastic Char-lotte
Ridin’ on the dashboard
Of my car
With her domains
And their stimulations
I will always remain
In Teacher Nation
With my plastic Char-lotte
I’ll go far
13) The term “life-long learners” has been scrubbed from their mission statement.
Someone has been teaching too long.
There are two signs of alleged failing school districts and schools.
1. Where RheeFormers have taken over administration of the schools and the district and have packed the elected school boards or have done away with democracy in those public schools.
2. Where we find large pockets of poverty and that is why I detest the term “failing schools” because the schools are not failing. Schools are just buildings. When schools are failing, that failure walks into classrooms everyday after the teachers have arrived, and the cause of that failure seldom if ever has anything to do with the teachers.
The real failure is coming from the top all the way to state legislatures, governors mansions, the White House and Congress.
Instead of failing schools we have failure by government—it has been programmed and is being pain for by Bill Gates and his criminal cabal of oligarchs.
In my view the people who are for “reform” have deformed the issues.
Education has heretofore been a search for ultimate values: good, truth, beauty. Who are we as human beings? What is the purpose of life? Why are we here? etc etc.
THESE are the issues which hurmankind’s greatest minds, secular and religious have centered upon.
Now, the issues are centered on going to college so you can make more money, fit in with corporations and their CEO leaders so they, the CEOs can earn more money, gain more power, corrupt our government ad nauseum.
A SURE FIRE way to destroy your civilization.
Scholarship, creative thinking, etc. Hardly even minor considerations.
When money is the bottom line and not the people’s interests, a sure fire way to destruction. “Of what possible use is a bag of gold in a desert”, whether the desert is a physical entity or an intellectual one.
What these people forget, the French revolution was NOT pretty and at some time the American people will come to their senses. I will probably not be around to see it, hope not, it won’t be pretty either. Our military is preparing for it – as much as they can and our government is assembling information one ALL of us. Not a pretty picture.
Test scores!?!?
I don’t need no stinkin test scores to tell me nothing!!!