The most important thing you should know about school grades is that they are a failed and absurd policy cooked up by Jeb Bush to stigmatize schools and set them up for privatization. Usually, they reflect the demographics of the school community. Often, they are totally meaningless. The school in my neighborhood went from an A to an F in one year, even though nothing had changed. School grades are stupid, and I’m happy to say that Mayor de Blasio abandoned them in New York City.
However, they were just initiated in Arizona, and there was a big surprise in store for State Senator Sylvia Allen. She is chairwoman of the Senate Education Committee. The charter that she helped to bring to her district rated an F. She was dumbfounded. She couldn’t believe it.
“Josselyn Berry, co-director at ProgressNow Arizona, said in a press release this week that Allen “for years preached the benefits of charter schools and vouchers for students and parents, but ironically the school she co-founded has gotten the lowest rating a school can get.”
Senator Allen couldn’t accept that her favorite charter school got an F.
“Allen also shifted blame to the new grading system, which the State Board of Education spent more than a year creating because state law requires schools be graded.
“I have grandchildren who go to this school and I have personally seen the help it has given to children. It is not an F school,” Allen said of George Washington Academy. Allen said she only works part-time for Edkey, George Washington Academy’s charter holder, leading a character program at the school.
“I have visited many schools in my district and if you had asked me to give them a grade I would have said they are all A’s but when I looked at what this new system gave them it was not a true reflection of what they do and how successful they are.”
Maybe Senator Allen will take the lead in abolishing the school grading system. Even though ALEC thinks it is a good idea, she can see with her own eyes that it doesn’t work. Besides, the school is already a charter. You can’t privatize a school that is already private.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
F is normal for many charter schools and still they are in existence. SHEEZ…guess $$$$$ talks and BS walks.
Any chance she could lose her seat?
A friend in Arizona informs me that the chair of the State Senate Committee on Education is a high school graduate who firmly believes that the world is 6,000 years old.
So you wanted a grading system for schools. It tells you your school stinks. So now there is something wrong with the ratings system. PLEASE!
I have this to say to State Senator Sylvia Allen. Duh! Do you even know how to think?
There’s a reason that almost 80 percent of parents highly approve and highly rate the schools their children attend across the country, because those parents have had the same experience.
Allen said, “I have grandchildren who go to this school and I have personally seen the help it has given to children. It is not an F school,”
Almost 80-percent of the parents and grandparents across the country have said the same thing for the public schools their children and grandchildren attend.
And here, this link is for the Trolls that attempt to plague this site by attacking anyone that doesn’t provide reputable evidence to support what they say or attack them even if they do.
Gallup/KDP:
When asked
Overall, how satisfied are you with the quality of education students receive in kindergarten through grade 12 in the U.S. today — would you say you are completely satisfied, somewhat satisfied, somewhat dissatisfied or completely dissatisfied?
47-percent replied they were completely and/or somewhat satisfied. (for schools they had no personal experience with)
Then there is this question: (based 0n K12 parents)
How satisfied are you with the quality of education your oldest child is receiving? Would you say you are completely satisfied, somewhat satisfied, somewhat dissatisfied or completely dissatisfied?
(Note, there is a typo that says 114 percent are someone dissatisfied — can’t be accurate when 35-percent are completely satisfied, 44-percent are somewhat satisfied, and only 7-percent are completely dissatisfied. That 114-percent in the Somewhat dissatisfied column should have been 14-percent.)
79-percent were completely or somewhat satisfied. (for the schools these parents had a personal connection with through their own children.)
Conclusion, the response for all the nation’s school is influenced by all the propaganda and lies the corporate reformers have been pumping out like green, moldy looking diarrhea through the media they own for the last few decades, but when it comes to the personal experiences of parents across the country for the local schools their children attend, the results are completely different. That opinion counts more than the one that has no personal link but what’s read or heard through the private sector media or the lying Alt-Right media.
Sorry, I forgot the link
http://news.gallup.com/poll/1612/education.aspx
Watch for trolls dismissing this link as biased data from the lying media or cherry picking other facts in the data to support what they want.
Lloyd, as I said in another comment, Senator Allen is a high school graduate who believes in “young earth” theory
OMG.
That’s the problem. Senator Allan is an OMG person. She breathes the fire and brimstone of a fundamentalist Christian. Since ISIS has already been taken, what do we call them?
A fascinating follow up to this situation in Arizona: http://tucson.com/news/local/arizona-schools-could-get-a-do-over-on-their-a/article_c458a3a5-ca52-5d42-906f-1c38e465f139.html