Jan Resseger here describes the eloquent case that Fort Wayne’s Mark GiaQuinta made against the A-F grading system.
Fort Wayne refuses to grade its schools by A-F because the board, of which GiaQuinta is president, understands that it will stigmatize schools attended by poor children but do nothing to improve them.
The A-F system was created to set schools up to fail and be handed over to charter operators or to discourage parents so they would abandon their school and seek vouchers.
There is no state where the A-F system makes schools better.
It is a tool of corporate reform, whose only purpose is to stigmatize schools, destroy the school community, encourage public officials to abandon them, and hasten the cycle of decline.
Labeling schools A-F is not accountability; it is a ranking system that has no redeeming feature.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Yet, Michigan is moving towards it! http://www.freep.com/article/20131027/NEWS06/310270124
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A total fiasco
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If anything, the owner of this blog understates her case.
It is the exact same thinking behind the leading charterite/privatizer promotion of high-stakes standardized testing in public schools: label, sort and rank, with rewards for the chosen few and punishments for the non-deserving many.
And when the “hard data” generated by the Holy EduMetrics don’t fit their agenda of starving and closing public schools in order to push $tudent $ucce$$ to charters and voucher outfits, they simply massage the numbers.
For a very recent example, see the following recent postings on other blogs about Louisiana:
Link: http://garyrubinstein.teachforus.org/2013/10/25/no-miracl/
Link: http://deutsch29.wordpress.com/2013/10/24/2013-louisiana-school-letter-grades-recovery-school-district-gains-nothing/
Link: http://crazycrawfish.wordpress.com/2013/10/27/new-orleans-sps-score-release-reveals-69-of-students-now-attend-failing-schools-according-to-bobby-jindal-compared-to-62-in-2005/
Whether letters or numbers, Andrew Lang’s comment about stats is good advice: “He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lamp posts – for support rather than for illumination.”
🙂
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“And when there are not enough failing schools, make the test harder.” – The Florida Plan
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Or insist that the schools be on a bell curve, so that there will ALWAYS be “failing” schools. That’s what Utah’s bright idea is.
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“. . . label, sort and rank, with rewards for the chosen few and punishments for the non-deserving many.”
Should the state be in the business of discrimination of its citizens through characteristics and abilities that are inherent/inherited, over which the individual has little to no control such as skin color, race, gender, age and/or mental capabilities??
I think not!
End academic discrimination now!
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Yet, Michigan is adding this! http://www.freep.com/article/20131027/NEWS06/310270124
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I was all set to make a joke about color coding, and then I read it:
“Green is a great school. Red is bad one. Lime, yellow and orange are in-between.
Michigan’s new color-coded school accountability system already could be up for an overhaul just two months after its debut. Some lawmakers say schools should get A-F grades just like students do, so parents and others can easily understand performance.
“It’s not clear, it’s not concise and it’s not transparent. Nobody knows what a lime green means, but everybody knows what an A means,” said House Education Committee Chairwoman Lisa Posthumus Lyons, an Alto Republican who is expected to start hearings this week on her soon-to-be introduced legislation to switch to letter grades.’
Call in the reform consultants! Time to change the system again!
I have a suggestion. How about green LETTERS to identify Michigan’s for-profit chain charters? Now that would be transparency.
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“. . . but everybody knows what an A means. . .”
Oh, then explain exactly what an “A” means Ms. Lyons.
Can anyone explain exactly what a school with an “A” grade means?
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The particular grading scheme is a red herring, and any other distractor would do as well to divert the marks’ attention from the real aim of the game. This is just another way that corporate and political parasites can feed off the essential business of the people by creating roadblocks and inserting themselves at control points.
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I went to a school district and a college which had A through F grading. The curve is built right into the system. Top students get As and Bs, the average students get Cs, and if it is obvious the student doesn’t know the material they get Ds or even Fs.
Number grades are more unforgiving and doesn’t necessarily reflect the true score a student deserves.
It’s a matter of preference, I suppose. However, it is not the end of the world. Choose your battles, but don’t lose sleep over this one. There are too many other battles out there to be caught up in a minor skirmish.
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Ellen,
“Top students get As and Bs, the average students get Cs, and if it is obvious the student doesn’t know the material they get Ds or even Fs.”
Those statements are inherently true, right? No, they are not. Please distinguish for us all the difference between having a 59.4% and a 59.5% of the points available and what the difference is. Let me give you a hint, there are no grades by any grading schema that are anywhere remotely accurate enough to make that distinction.
” . . . Choose your battles, but don’t lose sleep over this one. There are too many other battles out there to be caught up in a minor skirmish.”
So ingrained in our cultural habitus are grades that state sanctioned discrimination is now considered okay. This is not a “minor skirmish” but grades/grading is at the root/heart of many many educational malpractices and need to be shown the insidious evil that they are.
“Cause no harm”. Grades and grading cause many harms whether attached to a student (would you want to be called a “failure”?) or to teachers and/or schools.
Duane
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In Indiana, former State Supt. Tony Bennett also took state I-STEP test scores and then plotted them on a curve to guarantee more and more failures each year. Even if every
school scored within the range for an A, the A minus schools would be rated as failures on the curve.
Even schools which fell from A to C saw realtors flocking to those selling homes and businesses to urge owners to lower sales prices due to falling school ratings. Everyone loses with these grades intended to label but not to remedy.
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I work in a low income school. We’ve been doing well for years, but last year we turned over several teachers, and they were replaced with new, inexperienced teachers. Our test scores plummeted, and we are a D this year. As such, we have a team of 10 or 12 district people, few of whom have ever stepped foot in our school, who arrive each month to offer their opinions. It’s like throwing the spaghetti on the wall and seeing what sticks. We had a “walk-through” a couple of weeks ago, the outcome of which, was some teachers had too much teacher talk, and not enough student talk. Fair enough. How does that help us with our math scores, which is the reason we;re a D.
I used a district map to plot the D schools. What do you know? They’re all in the low income part of town. I’m retiring at the end of this school year. I’ve been passionate about my work for over 30 years, now I come home depressed. I’ve always felt that public schools were the foundation of democracy. That foundation is is being destroyed, and that’s the point of the reformers and their unproven reforms, isn’t it?
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“Our test scores plummeted. . . ”
Maybe you should be cheering that fact as maybe the students are learning something other than multiple guess bubble-in test taking skills.
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This is the latest highly reductive strategy for reporting evaluations. A number of state officials have adopted this policy,perhaps because it is articulated ln model legislation from the American Legislative Exchange Council.
Teachers and schools are assigned letter grades, thereby obscuring a host of issues with the underlying VAMs and cut scores while appearing to use nothing more complex that a traditional A-to-F grading system. However, as many as nine performance indicators are graded and summarized in a single rating. For example, a school cannot receive an “A” if any subgroup of students is awarded a “C.”
Some grades are based on students and their teachers “attaining a year’s worth of growth”– a seriously misleading concept. It comes as no surprise that such grades mirror the SES profiles for communities (Amos & Brown, 2013). References:
American Legislative Exchange Council. 2011, January). A-Plus literacy act, Model legislation: Chapter 1. School and district report cards and grades. Re-trieved from http://www.alec.org/model-legislation/the-a-plus-literacy-act/
Amos, D.S., & Brown, J. (2013, August 22). State unveils new report cards. Cincinnati Enquirer. Re-trieved from http://news.cincinnati.com/article/20130822/NEWS0102/308220025/State-unveils-revamped-report-cards
Laura H. Chapman. (2013). Accountability Gone Wild: The Econometric Turn in Education. Unpublished paper, version 1, available from chapmanlh@aol.com
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