Kentucky launched its new school rating system, based on federal law requiring states to rate schools and identify the “lowest” 5 percent.
Instead of letter grades (the Jeb Bush model), Kentucky will award stars.
Is this a distinction without a difference?
Most of the rating will be based on test scores and growth in test scores and graduation rates and other measures.
The experience of other states is that the ratings invariably show that the schools with the highest proportions of poor students get the lowest ratings.
No one should be surprised, since standardized tests are normed on a bell curve and highly correlated with family income.
Schools with affluent kids get high ratings, and schools with poor kids get low ratings.
Will Kentucky be any different?
Doubtful.
This mandate to rate schools based on test scores is baked into the federal Every Student Succeeds Act. Its purpose is supposedly informational, but in fact it is used to identify schools to close. Their students are directed elsewhere, or their school becomes a charter, and vast resources are wasted on structural changes that should have been spent reducing class sizes, promoting arts education, paying teachers more, and supporting strategies that help students do better in school and encourage teacher retention.
But we live in a time of stupid mandates. This law should be rewritten before we write off another generation of students.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
What else do you expect from Kentucky? I live and teach here: the government; the teacher unions; the public school admins and many of the teachers themselves remain willfully ignorant.
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So sorry, rwieck.
There’s a lot of what you describe going on these DAZE. It’s SICK.
Keep resisting. Keep telling the truth.
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ESSA = Every Student “Does NOT” Succeed Act!
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much, much more like ESSTTSA: Every Student Subject To Test Score Abuses
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“This mandate to rate schools based on test scores is baked into the federal Every Student Succeeds Act. Its purpose is supposedly informational, but in fact it is used to identify schools to close. Their students are directed elsewhere, or their school becomes a charter, and vast resources are wasted on structural changes that should have been spent reducing class sizes, promoting arts education, paying teachers more, and supporting strategies that help students do better in school and encourage teacher retention.”
Correct, but the mandate is also connected to ESSA’s requirement for report cards that show school-level per pupil expenditures along with test scores and other “perfomance” measures. The report cards are supposed to be simple so parents and taxpayers can see, for example, which whether teachers in one school are earning higher salaries than in other schools and whether salaries have any bearing on levels of achievement in schools. The school-by-school comparisons with a single district go well beyond teacher salaries and benefits. They extend to expenditures for curriculum and much more. One aim is to show which schools are most efficiently and effectively using local taxes, state taxes, federal funds (especially for Title I schools).
Page 60 in the following document offers an example of an ESSA compliant report card developed by USDE. If you love to munch on ESSA’s requirements for report cards, read the rest of the report. https://www2.ed.gov/policy/elsec/leg/essa/essastatereportcard.pdf
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Stars are obviously superior to letters, but states would be wise to avoid using stars, letters, colors, or numbers. The best system rates schools by awarding one to five smileys, a close second being one to five teddy bears. Third is party hats. Then again, I am not entirely convinced any school rating system really uses anything other than one to five dog whistles.
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Every time you post one of these rating stories, Diane, I wonder at the intelligence of the people perpetrating this fraud. I am guessing that they must be smart like foxes since no one could be stupid enough to replicate a system that has failed over and over again. They really must have no interest in quality schools. It has got to be another case of “follow the money.”
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Some are driven by religion?
Gov. Bevin’s meeting with DeVos included a representative from the Kentucky Catholic Conference.
In Milwaukee, parents in a Catholic school system were quoted as asking where the taxpayers’ voucher money went. Where religion begins and money stops….
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Current broadcast ads against Gov. Bevin make a strong case that Kentuckians aren’t a demographic that Bevin cares about.
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Transportation Secretary and wife of Ky.’s Mitch McConnell tried to help Bevin- giving Kentucky an edge for businessmen taking profits. Neither she nor her husband will try to replace the decrepit, overused interstate bridge between Ohio and KY because that’s the infrastructure that gives future payoff to all citizens.
McConnell/Chao and Bevin have limited interest, making money short term and putting it in their friends’ pockets.
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