Letter grades, growth models and stigmas.
NYC Educator suggests that bad education ideas start in NY and hit the west coast six months later. I’m not sure. We in the Midwest have produced our share of bad education ideas. But the school grade plan of Bloomberg and Klein are NY originals and are worth taking a look at.The NY Times editorializes today that the system of giving letter grades to schools should be tossed out:
Mr. Bloomberg should ditch the simplistic and counterproductive A through F rating system. It boils down the entire shooting match to a single letter grade that does not convey the full weight of this approach and lends itself to tabloid headlines instead of a real look at a school’s problems.
Otherwise the Times gives a stamp of approval to the Bloomberg/Klein accountability system. Yet, it seems that the public response to giving letter grades to schools based on a few test scores has created a backlash that even the Times can’t ignore.
The practice of giving, say, an F, to an otherwise high-performing school that lags in student improvement for a single year stigmatizes the entire school and angers parents. It also shakes the public’s faith in the evaluation system.
There’s a lot to look at in this case study. But one thing that jumps out at me is the issue of growth models. In the debate around reauthorization of NCLB, some critics of NCLB said that one way to improve the federal accountability provisions would be the use of growth models. They argued to not look at one or a two high stakes test scores one year. These critics argued that we should look at improvement on scores over time and compare those scores among similar schools. But that is precisely what was done in the NY case and it still led to this fiasco.
