In their hunger to make their underfunded schools look far worse than they are, Mississippi officials have come up with a truly absurd way to grade the schools.
If you care about the children, teachers, and public schools of Mississippi, please write or call to say so.
This is an email from The Parents’ Campaign to a teacher in Mississippi:
From: “Nancy Loome
Subject: A substantial change that affects your school
Reply-To: “Nancy Loome”
From: The Parent’s Campaign
Dear Friends,
The State Board of Education has voted in favor of a dramatic change to the school rating system, one that sets in stone the number of schools and school districts that can be rated in each of the A through F categories in a given year. Exactly 10% of schools will be allowed an A rating, regardless of how well (or how poorly) schools perform as a whole. And, each year, 14% will be rated F, no matter how much schools improve.
This is very different from the current system, which sets a minimum score that a school or school district must achieve to earn a given rating. Note that the board has decided that we should always have 40 percent more Fs than As.
The good news is that the law requires the board to accept feedback from the public before such a policy is implemented. This is your chance to weigh in. Click here to see the proposed changes, then send your comments in writing by mail, email, or fax to:
Mr. Walt Drane, Executive Director, Division of Research and Development
Mississippi Department of Education
P.O. Box 771
Jackson, MS 39205-0771
You may email comments to:
accountability@mdek12.org or fax them to 601-359-2471
According to the proposed policy, even if all districts attained the highest possible test scores, academic growth, and graduation rates, 14% of them would still be assigned an F. Likewise, if all districts sank to the lowest possible performance, 10% of them would still get an A. This “Hunger Games” approach to rating schools discourages collaboration among school districts; for a district to move up a level, another district will have to fall. That is bad for our children and our state.
Please weigh in; your feedback is important. The deadline to submit comments is 5pm on September 13. Our kids are counting on us!
Gratefully,
Nancy
222 North President Street, Suite 102
Jackson, Mississippi 39201
Phone 601.961.4551
http://www.msparentscampaign.org
Diane Ravitch's blog 
That way there will always be failing schools to use as evidence that the community based, locally controlled, democratic, transparent, non-profit, traditional public schools are losers and have to be replaced with autocratic, child abusing, often fraudulent and inferior, opaque, publicly funded, private sector, corporate charter schools that will not have to worry about that legislation because, for sure, they will be exempt. That way there will never be any failing corporate charters, and that separate an unequal sector will look successful, at least in writing according to this lopsided, double standard legislation.
This is the stupidity of competition for the sake of competition. Ironically, it is total incompetence.
Mississippi is looking pretty backward right now.
Mississippi has the highest poverty rate in the country based on household income.
Louisiana has the highest intellectual poverty rate in the country based on John White.
How about using the same system, allowing parents and students to rate legislators, with 14% mandated to fail and be removed from office at the end of the legislative session.
The scheme has only one purpose: Having a yearly quota for F schools that will be larger that the quota for A schools.
It would be useful to know the name(s) of the persons who have put this proposal into a legislative agenda.
Your suggestion sounds great in response to such an absurd rating system.
Actually, we here in New Mexico have the distinction of the highest poverty rate in the country at 22%…
Nonetheless, said evaluation policy is ludicrous, regardless of which state.
Science!
I don’t mind ideological agendas- they’re inevitable in our system, but don’t you degrade the whole idea of objective measurement with these anti-public school machinations?
Hey, folks. Sorry to pull you away from your important projects. This will only take a minute. For this coming year you will all be evaluated on a curve. 7 of you will be fired and 5 will be promoted. Some will be demoted, some will get some merit points — I won’t get into all the details right — Wait. Where are you going? I’m not quite finished. Is this lunch? . . . Hello! . . . Hello?
We’re seeing a big charter promotion for the start of the school year from the ed reform “movement” including those members of the movement in the federal and state governments.
What a shame none of them did a comparable push for public schools. Why should children value the public school they attend when their leaders obviously have absolute contempt for the schools?
Welcome back to the “crumbling prisons” where half the teachers are “illiterate”?
Great message. Good job! Start the year off with the usual grim message from the “movement”.
Today in the echo chamber- The 74 Edition:
Read it yourself. Charters are great, charters are great, charters are great, public school district is insolvent, teachers unions are evil.
They’re “agnostics”. And so many of them work in government! That’s the best part. These are the people who staff and direct the Obama Administration. We’re paying for this.
It is more about brainwashing than information.
Sounds like “cut scores” for school grading….isn’t that lovely 😦
I got my son’s Common Core test scores back. They exactly track his grades.
What I found out is the math teacher who had him in class for the last two years knows him better than the entire cast of consultants and experts who devised that test.
But I knew even that.
Just sent a letter. This system is known as “stack ranking” in the tech/business world, and it has disastrous results. It creates inefficiency and the complete opposite of cooperation. It is detrimental in a business setting and completely inappropriate for an educational setting. Stack ranking (curving) eliminates any validity of assessment. It is absurd, and I cannot think of a single situation in which it would be beneficial.
It creates winners and losers, the rich and the poor. It gives the rich justification for taking democratic rights away from the poor. Then, the rich call it “protecting the civil rights” of the poor; and the corporations laugh all the way to the bank.
As I mentioned below, Stack Ranking is what caused a decade of across the board stagnation at Microsoft, and it happened exactly as you described and is well documented.
And yet do not many school systems still grade students on the normal curve? Just asking.
Yes, but there is such great diversity in readiness that it usually makes sense. Still if all students totally bomb a test, the prof should either fail everyone or toss out the test. If all students ace a tough test, then all of them should get A’s. No?
Hmm. None of the school districts with which I am familiar “grade students on the normal curve.” So I would say, no, most don’t use that sorting mechanism.
I always thought that the one of the objects of my teaching was that everyone would earn an “A” (yes I played the grade game, letting the students know just how bogus it it). Earning that “A” would have meant that all students were doing all the work in the fashion they needed to in order to learn Spanish. In my very small, levels 3 & 4 class (yes both levels in the same hour) almost all students earned an “A” because they did what they needed to do to continue learning Spanish. However in levels 1 & 2, I never succeeded in getting all the students to do all the work they needed to do-tried hard but never succeeded.
Never ever thought about “grading on the normal curve.”
Duane, for some reason I assumed he was talking about colleges, and there are indeed many of them.
Sounds like they’ve resurrected and rebranded the Stack Ranking system that destroyed Microsoft ‘s innovation & profitability for a decade. What will the subsequent actions against schools be since they already know the outcomes? As we have come to expect from the reformy crowd, this is a profoundly stupid idea.
Hypothetical question, what if something amazing happens and all schools do equally well, or are at least bery very close in performance. How do they choose who gets what grade when they are all essentially the same?
They’ll use a lottery system to select the failures and winners.
Then do the same for Mississippi politicians.
Top 15% get A’s and the bottom 15% get F’s. Fair is fair.
Love it, Dennis
Most if not all teachers believe in being fair — that’s why children and even a majority of parents trust teachers. Most if not all politicians lie and don’t believe in being fair, because they’re willing to lie about anything. Donald Trump is the perfect example who lies way more than Hillary Clinton.
According to Gallup in December 2015, sixty percent of the public trusts high school teachers compared to 17 percent for business executives (CEOs), 8 percent for members of Congress, and 7 percent for lobbyists.
Only nurses, pharmacists and medical doctors rank higher than high school teachers who rank higher than the clergy.
http://www.gallup.com/poll/1654/honesty-ethics-professions.aspx
Education is the people power. People learn to stand up and let their voting rights to speak on their behalf. They need to practice “civil disobedience”. Workers need to unite and DEMAND their basic living cost to be paid to work. People need to withdraw all saving account at once, and stop working for one month at once.
This will enforce authority, employers, bankers, and all tycoons to come up with a reasonable solution to pay properly to workers. Back2basic
Like you thought and attitude, May!!
Reblogged this on Matthews' Blog.
Just wrote a response to Michigan’s school rating/closure policy.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/df8iqkzwrwo7pky/Identifying%20and%20supporting%20struggling%20schools%209-2%20cb.pdf?dl=0
Same points are relevant I think; except the Mississippi plan to radically normalize school quality metrics appears even more irrational and unfair.
Here are the core points.
First, if there are no schools or very very few schools in the state who are facing similar conditions (concentrations of students with learning challenges and lack of control over student and staff recruitment and retention) to those identified for sanction/closure, why shouldn’t the systems these schools are part of — districts, CMOs and state education system — be held accountable for rectifying the situation before the schools themselves are held accountable and forced to close?
Second, the analysis and reporting of information we are proposing can be done using existing and accessible data and with a modest information gathering effort. These activities would at least reveal what the conditions are faced by schools targeted for closure and whether there are successful exemplars of schools facing similar conditions. The results could also shift the focus away from identification and closing of poor schools and toward careful diagnosis and appropriate treatment of their challenges.