Florida pioneered the use of school grades. New York City followed. Now other states and districts are jumping aboard.
The latest to adopt school grades is Oklahoma. The superintendents there don’t understand what is gained by this action. For some reason, the people who put grades on schools think of this as “reform,” but it is not.
It is a label based mostly on test scores. What we have learned in New York City over the past decade is that the school grades are meaningless. Schools bounce from A to F, or from F to C to B to D. This happens even though nothing has changed.
In this society, we are obsessed with data even when the data are based on flimsy measures. Standardized tests are a good way to measure what percent of your students live in poverty and what percent are affluent. The former school will be labeled “failing,” and the latter will be a success.
How is this “reform”?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
The State Superintendent here says it’s more transparent. But the rules were developed in isolation and the public comment period was mismanaged. She says the grades will be easier to understand. But the technical manual for parents is 28 pages long and contains more than 40 tables. She says that superintendents are afraid of accountability. But they face a school board every year that gets to decide whether or not to rehire them.
This is not a reform. This is an ALEC-infused quagmire. It is an attempt to label schools and confuse parents, rather than reform them. This is nothing but a bunch of sycophants trying to impress Jeb Bush and Tony Bennett. God help us if they ever take us down the Louisiana reform path!
You are on the path already
Diane Ravitch
Diane is right! A Louisiana clone and the excuse your Superintendent is giving sounds like it came from the same script that John White and Gov. Jindal have used and continue to use in Louisiana. It sounded so familiar. Why of course it is. I knew I had heard it before. The same script from the same page and the same ALEC playbook.
Oh, it’s much worse than just testing…the use of this data will “fail” schools and then trumpet their failure. In order to earn an “A”, a school must score nearly 94%. The easy-to understand resources on the OKSDE website are anything but simple and transparent. The district Superintendents (nearly 200, I believe) who objected to the release of scores have been called names by our State Super and our Governor. Dedicated professional educators have been attacked personally.
The State Superintendent likened them to the kid who runs home to white-out his report card before his parents get home. Remember, she’s speaking to career educators…which she is not. She was a speech pathologist for a few years, became a dentist, and helped open a charter school in OKC because her own children were struggling in public schools. She sees herself as the heroine of DON’T BACK DOWN.
The spokesperson for the SDE says they’ve worked with districts, getting their input. I was at the Public Comments meeting, at the SDE…scheduled by the SDE. NO ONE representative from the SDE attended the meeting except the lawyer who pushed ‘play’ on the tape recorder. We all spoke to a tape recorder…superintendents, principals, school officials, legislators, PTA state officers, and I was the lone teacher…we were all ignored. Is THIS how our SDE works with us? Unfortunately, the answer is ‘yes’.
Our state officials are bullies, and they bully with smiles on their faces, with the knowledge that the media won’t pursue the story to the ultimate truth.
Tomorrow the grades come out…the same grades Mitt Romney thinks are such a good idea. My firm belief is the grades will show exactly what high-stakes testing shows: poverty matters. So, once again, schools and teachers and districts will be punished and publicly shamed because we serve poor children.
Pray for us.
I don’t know but I suspect my public school would get an “A” and you couldn’t pay me to put my kids in it.
In New York, progress reports give schools with 51 – 65 a “B”; strange cause with numbers like that you’d fail in our class and schools that earn 65.5+ get an “A” In what classroom would a 66/100 be an “A”? The person who designed this system must have had one of those lazy unionized public school teachers.
The idea is to assess these schools through a streamlined system, one that evaluates all schools on the same level playing field. Theoretically, this is good practice. In reality, however, it fails miserably because the things that are being assessed are not the things that make for “good” education. Plus, each community has its own needs and its own best practices to meet those needs. Demanding that every school follows a set of rules that are made for accountability purposes really does more harm then good.
The “data” gives a pseudo-scientific veneer to what are political decisions about power and control of public sector expenditures. Since “numbers don’t lie” – although we know all too well that people lie with numbers – whomever defines the terms and weightings of the measurements controls the agenda.
In my district, parents have the right to transfer their child to a “higher performing” school in the district if their local school is “lower performing”. Because my local school is in one of the more affluent areas of town, it usually scores a C, which is one of the higher grades in town. Because it scores higher, parents do transfer their kids, which means it has the largest class sizes in the district. I’d sooner send my kids to a “lower performing” school with smaller class sizes.