LIndsay Wagner of the NC Policy Watch reports that nearly 30 percent of the public schools in the state received a letter grade of D or F.
Surprise: Almost all of them are high-poverty schools.
“The only thing these grades tell us is where our poor children go to school and where our rich children go to school,” said Lynn Shoemaker, a 23 year veteran public school teacher representing the advocacy group Public Schools First NC at a press conference held by Senate Democrats.
The North Carolina General Assembly joined more than a dozen other states in adopting A-F school letter grades — a system of accountability that former governor of Florida Jeb Bush conceived more than 15 years ago. Eighty percent of North Carolina’s school grades reflect student achievement on standardized tests on one given day, and 20 percent reflect students’ progress on those tests over time….
“Is this data for shaming purposes?” said Rep. Tricia Cotham (D-Mecklenberg) in an interview with N.C. Policy Watch.
Rep. Cotham, who has worked at a low-wealth school, said it’s very damaging to receive yet another strike that these letter grades bring when low-wealth schools already battle against so many obstacles.
Since poverty is the root cause of low academic performance, why isn’t the North Carolina leadership working on that problem instead of shaming schools?
– See more at: http://pulse.ncpolicywatch.org/2015/02/05/high-poverty-schools-receive-vast-majority-of-states-d-and-f-grades/#sthash.2qix4ld8.dpuf
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Reblogged this on David R. Taylor-Thoughts on Texas Education and commented:
We have similar movement in the State of Texas. The Lieutenant Governor is hell bent on passing the same law . My /response:
https://davidrtayloreducation.wordpress.com/2015/01/22/the-scarlet-letter-again/
LikeLike
There’s no surprise that low-income schools score significantly lower than schools that cater to the upper-middle class. As mentioned in the article, shaming the many failing schools is not a remedy for inadequate performance, nor does it incite the correct type of motivation for schools to work harder, despite societal obstacles. I’m by no means asserting that schools shouldn’t be accountable for academic performance. However, why does school evaluation have to be grounded in standardized test scores? 80% of the evaluation to be based on scores is extremely concerning. Due to the lack of materials, inherent biases in exams, and lack of external resources to support teachers and students in these low-income schools are set up to fail these evaluations.
Some questions I’m left with after reading your blog: Where’s the transparency when it comes to budget distribution? Why are we not actively pursuing equitable policy? And which states have a model for evaluations that are genuinely fair for low income communities? It’s imperative that we need to make changes, but how do we enhance the capabilities of certain schools without diminishing the resources for another?
LikeLike
“shaming the many failing schools is not a remedy for inadequate performance, nor does it incite the correct type of motivation for schools to work harder, despite societal obstacles.”
I want to suggest that we re-frame the issue to students/parents and not focus on “schools should work harder”. Schools can’t work. Schools are made of concrete and other construction materials. Schools don’t teach. Schools don’t learn.
When we allow the lying, greedy corporate reformers to control the debate and we also use the term “schools”, the greedy liars win. When these liars say “failing schools” I think we should respond with “failing students and parents”.
Example: “I think it is very interesting that you (I’m referring to lying greedy corporate reformers here) mention ‘failing schools’, because I’ve never known or met a ‘failing school’, but I have met students who didn’t do the work and failed to learn and parents who failed to support the teachers and their children so learning takes place.”
For instance, when I was teaching I worked between 60 to 100 hours a week but was only in class with my students five hours a day or 25 hours a week. I think as teachers, we work really hard for the school but what about the parents that do not support their children at home to read, study or do school work, or the students—and there were many of them in my classes—who did not do the classwork, read the assignments, study, read outside of school for fun, do homework and so on?
No matter how hard the “schools” work, and I’m assuming when the lying greedy corporate reformers use the word “school”, they mean teachers and staff and not students and parents, the issue is meaningless unless the children are working just as hard to learn as the teachers are to teach.
Teachers can teach, plan lessons and correct student work until exhausted—as I did for thirty years—but all those long hours will accomplish nothing as long as this issue is framed by the lying, greedy corporate reformers and we allow them to keep focusing on the word “school”. Using the term “failing schools” removed the students and parents from the debate. School, in this case, then becomes an abstract concept that is misleading.
But students and parents are not abstract. They are concrete because they are made of flesh and blood. Schools are only a collection of buildings where teachers teach and then its up to those flesh and blood students to learn what teachers teach and that is what is really taking place or not.
Who is really failing to learn the correct answers for these flawed bubble tests? Not schools because schools are not a who.
LikeLike
Great posts Gabbylap and LLoyd – accountability for students and parents is a thing of the past. The only ones held accountable are the teachers and while I think we should be accountable for doing our best, we cannot cure apathy, ignorance, or defiance.
The things that go on in the classroom today are so far from acceptable that in my wildest dreams I could not have conceived of them even a few years ago. If you do not want to do something I cannot make you do it and so I say, accept your failure, it was your choice.
LikeLike
These grades are a complete farce. My daughters went to one of the “A” schools for many years and while they did have great test scores, the actual learning going on was minimal. I didn’t realize how bad it was until I switched my younger daughter to a magnet school. In case you aren’t aware of what magnets are, they are schools in low income neighborhoods where they typically have high student turnover and low test scores. They implement a special program and take up to 50% of students from around the county to participate in that program. This is the 1st year this particular school has been a magnet and the special program, Montessori, is being phased in gradually so my 4th grader isn’t participating in Montessori, but it’s been a STEM school for several years, which is what attracted us.
The new school got a “C” on that list but I have seen such a drastic difference in how my daughter is learning. At the “A” school the kids were spoon fed the answers and “learning” was little more than memorizing facts. At the “C” school the approach is completely different. The students are presented with a problem. They have to ask questions and the teacher guides them to the answers. The school has been like this for many years, not just since it started Montessori. The culture at the school is completely different. It took my daughter a few weeks to adjust to this method but now that she’s accustomed to it she is loving school even more. I am fascinated by the transformation of how she is thinking now vs a year ago. While they may not have the best test scores, I feel like my child is getting a much better education.
LikeLike
As a NC resident/student, I find your comment extremely interesting. Thanks for sharing the details of your daughter’s education experience. I’m so glad that she was able to find a more suitable education style at the Montessori school. I am currently taking a class at UNC about education policy, and we have been discussing the various styles of schools. It is definitely important to remember that education is not a “one size fits all” program. I am excited to share this example with my class! Thanks for sharing!
LikeLike
clr21 – I am happy to give you an example that can be used to help future educators. I come from a family of teachers: my father, grandfather, great aunts and my sister are all or had been teachers. I saw first hand how much time my father spent outisde of the classroom to make his classes relevant and fun. Many students have said he was the best or most influential teacher they’d ever had. But I digress….
I’d like to clear up one thing. My daughter’s new school is a Montessori school but they are phasing it in. This year it’s K-2. Next year they will add 3rd, then 4th, etc. My daughter is in 4th grade this year so she isn’t participating in the Montessori program. Her school has chosen to implement a few aspects here and there but she’s still getting a traditional education. So if you are going to present this case to your class, I wanted to make sure you were able to make that distiction, as Montessori is a very novel approach to teaching and learning.
The difference between this school and the “A” school is the approach they have had for years. I don’t know if the principal (whom I ADORE) decided to eschew the whole grading system and stick to her guns about how to effectively teach kids or if it’s part of the STEM program they’ve had there for years but it works in ways that cannot be quantified on a standardized test. The children are challenged to ask questions and come up with answers. They are using all kinds of great opportunities to spark the children’s interest, creativity and imaginations. The kids are learning more because the teachers make it fun and intereting. This doesn’t always transfer directly to a child’s EOG test score but in the long run, these kids will have a love of learning and will know how to ask questions and look for answers. Which is, in my opinion, what school should be teaching us.
I wish there was a way to contact you privately so I could share more details. I think you would really enjoy learning about this school. It’s a treasure and I’m thankful every day that I was able to get my child into it.
LikeLike
NCMom: you have just made a strong case for not confusing student “performance/achievement” and “teachers adding value” with genuine learning and teaching.
The former has to do with how students do on a particular day on a particular standardized test and, in the current climate, how the numbers & stats generated by the test scores are supposedly indicative of performance/achievement by students and teachers. That is, finding a seemingly objective way to label, sort and rank students and teachers and then rewarding [a few] and punishing [the vast majority].
All based on, and in the service of, a very narrow view of what it means to learn and teach. Expressed in the terminology of psychometricians, i.e., the numbers/stats folks that design and validate and produce tests.
The latter only seems to be completely subjective and difficult to define. It’s not just that you “know it when you see it” but that it looks and acts different: messy, constantly changing, moving beyond constricted limits of what constitutes success and failure.
Unlike the former, the latter doesn’t move in carefully graduated steps but can take off in leaps and bounds in all directions. And it feels different too: unlike test scored-learning and -teaching, the genuine articles can surprise and delight and even astound.
Is all this mere word play? Nope. Want to read about what a genuine teaching and learning environment looks like? What sort of “no excuses” commitment in time and effort and resources it takes?
Go to the link just below and read a paean to it by Bill Gates! About His Own Bad Self! Then ask yourself: why do the self-proclaimed “education reformers” fight for and promote and ensure and mandate this for THEIR OWN CHILDREN but not for OTHER PEOPLE’S CHILDREN?
Besides the linked article, click on the link in the article that contains his full speech of 9-23-2005 to an assembly at Lakeside School. Then think about the slogan: every school a Lakeside!
Link: https://seattleducation2010.wordpress.com/2012/06/18/bill-gates-tells-us-why-his-high-school-was-a-great-learning-environment/
Thank you so much for your simple and clear but powerful words.
😎
P.S. Please excuse, Lloyd Lofthouse, but I love quoting the Chairman against the Chairman.
LikeLike
“Bill says Lakeside was great because the teachers pushed the students to achieve (and when you push students to achieve, of course they do, especially when you challenge them to read your college thesis and your ten favorite books — what student wouldn’t rise to such a fascinating challeng”
Gates left out the support and pushing he had from his parents—something many children who live in poverty don’t have. Bill Gates has no idea what the challenge is to push kids to achieve when there is little or no support from their parents or guardians and when the teacher attempts calling them, the phone is disconnected or no one answers or ever calls back of the teacher leaves a message.
LikeLike
Thank you for that link. It was enlightening. I feel like these new methods that are being hoisted onto our teachers and students are shackling the teachers to the desk and completely taking away their ability to embrace a teachable moment. They have to stick to the plan.
Something I forgot to mentionin my original post that your link made me remember, was one of the things our school does is keep the class size to no more than 20. The teachers in all but K have given up their assistants so they could balance the budget and keep it at that level. It works. It simply works.
LikeLike
Not a surprise.
For example:
Billions of Federal and CA State funding thrown at Los Angeles Unified over the last 30 years hasn’t changed a thing. The district has a 30% truancy rate according to Kamala Harris, state Atty. General.
So before you can ‘fix’ this you have to make sure that a child is sitting in their seat at school.
And until that time Billions more thrown at under achieving districts won’t change a thing. But the LAUSD Administrators will continue to get high off the chart salaries and LAUSD will continue buying computers from Gates/Murdoch/Pearson related companies, with the Billions received in Federal and CA funding going straight to their pockets.
LikeLike
Even the PISA reveals that children living in poverty are also challenged when it comes to earning an education and this is a global problem in EVERY country—-but, what we won’t hear from the cherry picking, for-profit lying corporate reformers is that the U.S. does a better job teaching children that live in poverty than any country on the plane, and this job is done in the transparent, non profit, democratic public schools.
From the Stanford study of the global PISA results:
> Because in every country, students at the bottom of the social class distribution perform worse than students higher in that distribution, U.S. average performance appears to be relatively low partly because we have so many more test takers from the bottom of the social class distribution.
>Disadvantaged and lower-middle-class U.S. students perform better (and in most cases, substantially better) than comparable students in similar post-industrial countries in reading. In math, disadvantaged and lower-middle-class U.S. students perform about the same as comparable students in similar post-industrial countries.
>On average, and for almost every social class group, U.S. students do relatively better in reading than in math, compared to students in both the top-scoring and the similar post-industrial countries.
http://www.epi.org/publication/us-student-performance-testing/
LikeLike
I also read, though, that some charters are not showing good grades. So the grade might serve to show a few charters are not what they had claimed they could be. Also, charters that are below a C are required to send a letter home to parents indicating such.
Dr. Ravitch’s question: “Since poverty is the root cause of low academic performance, why isn’t the North Carolina leadership working on that problem instead of shaming schools?”
I don’t think the legislature of NC has ever tried to involve themselves in education policy to the extent they have in the last few years, if ever. Once they decided to use education to pursue ideological power or black and white ultimatums, I don’t know what conversation can change that over to a conversation about poverty. In fact, I think they would tell you that they are trying to shave back on spending so our economy can rebound with business, which will help with poverty so we must make laws that every child can read by age 9 at a certain level and punish the people who were supposed to make that happen and quit trying to put money into schools for anything else. They think hollowing out our schooling process is a good thing, it appears—like whacking down a hedge so it will bloom thicker and less leggy. Also, I imagine they would like to blame poverty on some sort of lack or failure to produce by the schools of the last couple decades. Therefore, they conclude, something is obviously not right about how we have been schooling and therefore must be changed.
The accountability talk, which was in vogue in the 90s and early 2000s, got us here, I think. Then you add in Race to the Top (and I think there would have had to have been major creative reworking of how we approach our schooling if we had been unable to get the money from RttT (not saying such a reworking would have or could have been impossible or even a bad thing at all—it probably would have been a good thing)), BUT the focus of education from accountability also has to change in tandem with conversations about poverty. We can’t unring the bell of RttT, but we can quit ringing it now, I think. And I wish we would. Poverty has never dominated the education conversation, except maybe to make a case for establishing public education in the 19th century. Also, much of the poverty is among our students because it is among our adults (if the children live in poverty, that means their parents live in poverty too). Therefore, I imagine, a limited view and unprecedented involvement in decisions about schooling by our legislature isn’t allowing a connection about how we school with how we fix problems like poverty, but they think it does. Instead of being deferential to our State Board of Ed once they identify a problem that schools could help, they have instead decided they know how the schools should fix it. In short, I think they think they are helping poverty by what they are doing with their involvement in the expectations of our schools and the resources allotted to carry them out.
We are in a fallout period. Fallout from RttT. Fallout from our General Assembly trying to “make an example” of teachers, or something. Fallout from resentment that poor people exist. Fallout from resentment that we are all in this together (North Carolinians, black, white, Christian or non, gay or straight, blended families or single parent or traditional, rich, poor). Fallout from resentment of paying taxes. Fallout from resistance to the fact that white people won’t be in charge forever. Fallout from the assumption that testing and technology can solve most things. Fallout from the involvement of Bill Gates and the influence of Jeb Bush.
It would be easy to blame ALL of the fallout I just listed on the economy, which is why we don’t have conversations about poverty because we have conversations about the economy and assume the economy will fix poverty. How does leadership have a conversation about poverty, I wonder. On what would it be blamed? What salvation would be sought? I think our leadership thinks they are doing that.
So I get the question, but I think the question itself is too simple. Instead of talking about poverty, they shame teachers. Well. . .maybe. I think what it is, is that they think the economy will fix poverty, that schools have a narrow responsibility that can be and should be measured in order to contribute to economy effectively (both in terms of return on investment and in terms of high expectations for future workers), so that’s where they focus. So I would frame the question as follows: why doesn’t NC leadership allow the State Board of Education to make policy decisions and defer to them when they believe schooling is a factor in an outcome they are trying to change (poverty via the economy with strict and narrow expectations for the graduates who will make up the future workforce), and not focus so much on teachers and teacher accountability? (Of course, because of RttT, our state board of ed was limited in the practical discretion they could use anyway).
Fallout.
LikeLike
I think one big reason that NC’s powers-that-be don’t tackle poverty issues is because they believe poverty is a choice. If people didn’t want to be poor, they would get an education and a job and work hard, and then everything would be OK. Nice if it works, but… Meanwhile, in Charlotte, there is a new initiative to study and address poverty. We’ll see how that goes.
http://www.charlotteobserver.com/2014/12/31/5417980/mecklenburg-task-force-work-to.html#.VNlM7oVtprE
LikeLike
I don’t understand what the big deal about this letter grade, They made all the test results available in the past. Granted, the new website is spiffier but I also noticed it doesn’t show results for students who are not economically disadvantaged. So it seems as though NC paid a lot of $ to give less information.
LikeLike
As a 21 year old who wants to be a teacher when I graduate this breaks my heart. I feel like North Carolina is grasping at straws trying to heal the broken education system and this is not helping. No wonder high poverty schools receive low grades, no money is invested in them from the state. While this problem has been around for a while, my question is what can be done to solve it?
LikeLike
North Carolina never had “broken schools” until the powers that be started trying to “heal” them.
LikeLike
Makes sense. Before they could improve the public school by replacing them with inferior for profit corporate charters, they had to break the public schools first.
After all, if it isn’t broken, you can’t fix it so they decided to go out and break them.
LikeLike
You bring up a great point about the utility of the current grading system. I’m pretty new to this topic and I just have a few questions: What will the impact be for schools who are “failing?” And would you argue that the current grading system should be revised, or abolished?
LikeLike
The A-F system should be abolished. It provides no useful information. Its purpose is to set schools up to be closed and privatized.
LikeLike
The A-F system should be abolished. It provides no useful information. Its purpose is to set schools up to be closed and privatized.
LikeLike
Reblogged this on biochemlife and commented:
Pay attention everyone. Schools with high poverty children need more attention and support not sanctions.
LikeLike