The letter-grading system that is spreading across many states originated in Florida during Jeb Bush’s tenure as governor. His goal was to show how poorly public schools were doing and to blame schools if students had low test scores, thus diverting attention from the social and economic causes of poor performance in school. Red states love letter grades, as does Mayor Bloomberg in New York City, who has advanced privatization as much as he could during this three terms in office.
This reader writes about the sham of the Indiana letter grade system:
Can you imagine taking your child to a doctor who knowingly and willfully misdiagnoses your child with cancer and recommends immediate, intense chemotherapy?
Further, even though you questioned the doctor and he could not explain how he came up with the diagnosis; he could not point to any direct source of cancer; he demanded you subject your child to intense chemotherapy anyway? Can you imagine being forced to purposely intervene with toxins to slowly poison your child even though you know the diagnosis is invalid?
So it goes in many Indiana schools today.
From the IDOE to the Statehouse, everyone admits the current A-F grading system is invalid and unreliable. No one at the state can explain exactly how the grades were calculated. Yet those schools doing great work and still receiving D’s and F’s, must give evidence to the state that they are attempting major interventions to improve student test scores.
How are they doing this? More testing. More data-analysis. They are purposefully increasing toxic interventions that are poisoning the natural desire to learn in our most vulnerable students.
Do you know how demoralizing it is for teachers in these buildings to witness such malpractice?
When will this madness stop?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Self respect of the teachers is plummeting. Those close to retirement are planning their exits, the ones just a few years in are questioning their choices and the real sadness is for those caught in the middle with their sad and muted resignation. They hate and know the ridiculousness of ALL of this, But, districts move out capable and smart people who would question these measure and replacement with people who have swallowed the kool aid or atleast appear to have done so. Working with these people is further demoralizing- how can they stomach this? It is proof that they are not using the very skills we hope to instill in our young minds- analytical thinking/evaluating evidence/calculating values and choices.
No voice, no security, no choices but bad ones and all the while teachers are swimming in a sea of mandates that they can’t support and must encourage young kids to take seriously. The older students can feel the level of disrespect and it trickles down to every aspect of the day to day– what kind of a person stays a teacher? Someone with out choices or without spines or without the ability to truly speak out- students have more say than the teachers do.
Choose: teachers can be be evaluated by invalid tests or be evaluated by a poll of children/parents regardless of their background/training and certainly without the full knowledge of running a complete classroom. They work day in and day out in buildings that are emblazoned with inaccurate score of A-F and surrounded without people that are similarly disrespected. It is a gloomy prospect and it saps the energy out of the best teachers who then don’t have 110% to give to their students. Except…. those world changing Teach for Awhile wonderkinds who know everything about the world since they got into and out of some decent colleges.
Spending time with really professional teachers swirling around with the layers of disingenuous or truly dillusional teachers is to dispare.
Teachers have furloughs, increase in costs, no security for pensions, positions and now evaluations.
What kind of a person will want to stay for the long haul. It will cost more than the gallons of ink, glue, reams of paper and school supplies they buy on their own dimee- it will cost these teachers their self respect.
I wouldn’t trust many teacher to really be critical thinkers if they go into teaching now under these conditions. This will be the era of the sheep teachers- battalions of teachers too scared, too blind or, hate to say this, too stupid to be the kind of teachers we want for the future of this country.Teachers who don’t question mindless teaching regimes, who don’t mind having to punch in with their finger prints for everything, teachers who can stomach the hours of professional development drivel that is being shoveled down their throats.
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NOT a promising picture to be sure.
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“When will this madness stop?” Hell, it seems to me that Jeb Bush is just gettin’ started. He’s coming to Texas on Wednesday where he can buddy up with some more like-minded individuals who are fixin’ to inflict even more pain and humiliation on our schools. During this legislative session, Texas will be crafting a whole new accountability system. Good-bye Exemplary, Recognized and Unacceptable. Say hello to A-F. It’s all the same; evaluating teachers and students using standardized test scores.
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I apologize on behalf of all sentient Floridians that we exported our school grading systems. I am terrified that we may likewise attempt to export Hillsborough County’s Gates initiated teacher evaluation system. Until brighter heads prevail in this state, we should restrict our exports to oranges.
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I have been asking for years “when will the madness stop” When I read Diane’s book The Death of the Great American School System, I was convinced that is was only a matter of time before all this nonsense fell apart. I thought it would be like McCarthy but he was a lightweight compared to what is going on now.
I am hanging on to DAP in my pre-k classroom but every day is a challenge.
I absolutely refuse to bail out and abandon my students. Mayor Bloomberg will have to find me ineffective and fire me. Many of my colleagues live in fear because they think they have no options and some are just sheet who follow blindly.
What worries me is what is going to happen when all the parents who bought into the charter concept find out at the end that their child is not prepared for anything except most likely menial jobs. By then it will be too late for this generation.
I fear a major revolution. At some point either the public will truly wake up and demand this nonsense stop or future generations can read in the history books about the rise and fall of the United States of America in the same way we read about Rome, and Great Brittan and all the other glorious empires that came before us. America was a little experiment. I am hopeful those over 200 years ago who predicted our form of government would never survive will be mistaken.
I just wish I knew what it will take to change the course of human events.
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The charter I work at is an IB school, and everyone there is dying trying to make sure the first cohort does well on the junior exams next year. Not ALL parents are going to be disillusioned by all charters. As in everything, it all depends on the effort and quality of the teachers and the quality of the students. We don’t keep the sows ears. We keep the ones who are really smart. It’s magnum diversified too. So we WILL be a model charter, but we don’t have no damn management company doing the thinking. We do our own. WE will succeed.
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Well Harlan, your own statement says it all about charter schools: “We don’t keep the sows ears. We keep the ones who are really smart.” You weren’t supposed to let the general public know that fact.
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It’s a grab for money and to control. How these yahoos get away with what they do is PURE EVIL.
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It’s just another way to keep all others at the bottom….when you think about it, they don’t truly want this generation to succeed…..they only want their children to get ahead and stay ahead of the rest…..they take away our resources in schools, give us inexperienced administrators, close our schools, don’t want to raise minimum wage, try to supress our votes…..I could go on and on as to how they try to keep the 99% down while they get richer and continue to set their children up so they could rule over our children and our students in the future……SHAME…..
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This madness will stop when all teachers stand up and say, “This madness stops here now with me.”
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Reblogged this on Transparent Christina.
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Rather than taking all these tests, they could probably just measure the average adjusted gross income at each school and come up with the same results. But that would take all the fun out of it.
As they said in the olden days, how can you make bricks without straw.
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Surely someone has done that kind of statistical test. What’s the coorelation between AGI of each school district and their test results.
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The good news is that for this aspect, at least, the new supt. Glenda Ritz, has received support from many Republicans that the A-F system needs to be scrapped.
http://www.ibj.com/panel-supports-scrapping-indiana-school-grades/PARAMS/article/39734
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Of course it is JUNK SCIENCE.
No surprise that this is coming from Jeb Bush-he at least has been transparent about his intentions. Candidate Obama promised us Linda Darling Hammond and gave us Arne Duncan. Bait and switch. Candidate Obama promised NO MORE JUNK SCIENCE.
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And, may I interject, if schools are being misgraded, imagine how junk science APPR systems are mischaracterizing sound and effective teachers. It’s literally like being lied about, and the onus is on the teacher to prove, if they can, otherwise.
I do believe in school cultures in which one’s pedagogy can and should be critiqued by peers and heavily experienced, sagacious administrators, all in a laboratory type of experimental, scientific, supportive and reflective collaborative culture. We always need to examine our teaching, as in scripting, tempo, timing, rhythm, body language, materials, props, transitions, questioning techniques, equitability, differentiation, comprehensible input, advocacy, parent engagement, and mobility inside the classroom. The goal is to support each other to improve pedagogy, to grow as a professional, to get a “tune-up”, and to increase the chances of a child doing and learning better. The goal of any grading system is not to “gotcha” the teachers out of the profession, with the exception of some very infrequent outliers.
The fact that schools and teachers must guarantee excellence in pedagogy and professionalism is NOT the same thing as saying that we must guarantee the score of a child. . . or the grade of a school for that matter. A world class education can NEVER be boiled down to an “if-then” statement. It should only be that easy, but as the controversial but interesting Charlotte Danielson will tell you, teaching is a very complex, multi-layered endeavor. Those who only look at numbers withoug having the will to look at the narrative that lead up to those numbers should not be policy makers or game changers. I think even the lay public, parents especially, are gaining some traction to this notion.
But this is truly what we can expect from the vast majority of policy makers who have had little to no experience teaching pre-k to 12th grade in a public school. This whole grading system of schools is far more about power than improving a child’s educational experience.
Pushing back against this corporate reform is indeed one of the hills I am happy to die on, forgive the metaphor.
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Teaching is a craft, not a crap shoot. If we wish schools, professionals and students to be supported then the decision-making should come from individuals who know what it takes to bring about change….and then the money needs to be focused in that direction. You don’t realize how difficult teaching is until you are involved and when people criticize, that only makes things worse.
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I’m not sure if any of the mayoral candidates have taken a position on the letter grading system in NYC, but it’s absolutely a policy I’d like to see stopped.
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It makes perfect sense. If I was in charge of testing district schools and got paid for each test I gave, it wouldn’t take me very long to figure out if I failed schools, they would panic and test repeatedly, maybe 5 times a year, to find the problem; but if I passed them, they would say “great” and move on.
There is a very real economic incentive for these for profit testing agencies to fail schools.
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We already have letter grades here in Louisiana. Started out on a 120 point scale, but is now moving to a 100 point scale. Our high poverty school (94%) scored 84, which is by the state definition a D. Dont ask me to explain why 84 is a D, I can’t. We found out the new formula for figuring out a school’s performance score (SPS) and calculated what our score would be using last Spring school data with the new formula. The score based on the 100 point scale would be in the 60’s, still a D. So this Spring when parents see our school SPS score drop from 84 to 64, they will think our school has dropped by 20 points. We are trying to get the word out now, before the tests scores come out. So goes the agenda of our state department of education. The New Orleans charter district schools (RSD) are at the bottom of the state SPS list (Ds and Fs), yet the DOE tells the state and the nation what great progress they are making. I wonder what kind of spin they will put on this one??? The SPS and letter grade formula is a moving target and no matter how many times we rise to their challenge, they continue to change thre rules on us. When will the madness stop?
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To answer your question: When you stand up and shout: “NO, WE ARE NOT PLAYING THIS INSANE GAME ANYMORE.” Hold a press conference and have a poster sized “school report card”, rip it apart and then burn the pieces all the while letting them know that the concept is pure BULLSHIT (or as I say to my rural students, it’s 100% USDA certified excrement of bovine origin.).
Quit playing the deformers’ game.
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It is curious your correspondent compared the outcome of Indiana’s letter grade system to medical malpractice. Especially because it seems to me the American medical system is being moved (reluctantly, glacially) away from the profit-motivated model to a model more in line with the social good. Meanwhile, American education seems to be rapidly ushered the opposite way.
So this week, I saw Steven Brill on the Daily Show talking about his Time Magazine cover story about excesses in the medical industry, and he specifically said the heinous costs are not driven by doctors and nurses. I thought that was a useful bit of follow-the-money journalism. And then I read in Wikipedia that two years ago Brill put out a book championing a charter school while finding problems arise from teachers’ unions. I wonder what he’ll be writing about a few years from now, if healthcare-like privatization becomes America’s new education norm.
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I’ve posted similar responses, but I largely agree that the assessment system used to force schools to change may be faulty, but I’d disagree with teacher’s characterization of data analysis as toxic, at least without further clarification as to what is meant. In the teacher’s analogy, data analysis would be similar to taking vitamins or eating healthy. Even if the diagnosis is cancer, eating healthy and taking vitamins aren’t going to hurt. I’ve never seen a situation in which an appropriate amount and type of data analysis is “toxic.”
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Any classroom “data analysis” based on scantron type tests is 100% pure bovine excrement!!
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Two responses: 1st, there are many more types of data than ones collected by scantron. 2nd, I’m not sure we can judge the instructional utility of an assessment by the method of scoring.
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Anyone want to create this?
http://www.GradeOurEducationLeaders.com
or:
http://www.GradeOurEducationReformers.com
A place for us teachers to assign letter grades to our Education “leaders” such as Bloomberg, Bennett, Rhee, Kopp, Bush, state superintendents, governors, mayors, DOE leaders, legislators, etc.
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Happily, our Superintendent of Public Instruction, Glenda Ritz has assured us that this system will be junked in Indiana.
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Not so fast, Don.
INDIANAPOLIS — A bill that would have scrapped Indiana’s A-F grading scale for individual schools has been withdrawn by its sponsor in the Indiana Senate.
Republican Sen. Carlin Yoder of Middlebury pulled the bill Monday before it could be voted on by the full Senate. Yoder says he still wants to have a new school assessment system put in place and will work to have a new proposal developed later in this year’s legislative session.
The Senate Education Committee voted unanimously last week to back replacement of the A-F scale, which was a top campaign issue last year by new Democratic state schools Superintendent Glenda Ritz.
A spokesman for Ritz says she’s disappointed the bill was withdrawn and that she’ll work with legislators on new school accountability standards.
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