9486 in the collection
An F School? Depends on How It’s Judged
Read this and see if you
can think, by any stretch of the imagination,
that Mayor Bloomberg, The Broad Foundation, the
Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and the rest
of the corporate bigwigs financing what they
will call school reform have the best
interest of children at heart. They seem
determined to destroy public confidence in public
schools.
By Robert Gebeloff
In New York City’s data-driven system for
assessing the quality of its public schools, the
New Venture Middle School in the Morrisania
section of the Bronx received a D on this year’s
report cards. But unravel the complex formula the
city uses to grade the schools, and tweak it to
weigh factors differently, and New Venture would
look a lot better — or worse.
If, for example, the city had counted two years
of data rather than one, New Venture would have
earned a B. On the other hand, erase the peer
groups the city uses, and compare New Venture’s
performance instead to all middle schools
citywide, and it would receive an F.
While the city’s report cards are based on far
more factors — including demographics, tests,
parental surveys and peer comparisons — than just
about any school system in the nation, the
ultimate A through F grades are determined by a
series of subjective decisions about which
factors to use and how to weigh them.
To examine how these decisions, which have been
the subject of much debate since the system was
unveiled in 2007, affect the grades, The New York
Times adjusted the formula used to grade schools
and came up with four alternative grading. When
the new formulas were applied, the grades for
hundreds of schools, as at New Venture, came out
differently.
The first alternative grading method broadens the
microscope to include data from two years instead
of one. This helps blunt fluctuations based on
fluke one-year spikes or drops in performance
that often occur in standardized testing,
particularly among smaller schools; indeed, it
eliminated many of the most radical swings in
grades from year to year.
A second alternative shifted the emphasis away
from test score improvement and toward pure
performance: What percentage of a school’s
students met state standards for proficiency.
The city counts year-to-year progress as 60
percent of the overall grade, performance as 25
percent; this weighting was reversed in the
second alternative to reward schools more for
general excellence in scores, even if the scores
did not change much over the past year.
Under this method, instead of 18 schools
receiving F’s, 7 would have. And 8 that received
a D and 3 that received a C under the city
formula would have failed.
In a third grading method, The Times removed the
city’s complex method of comparing schools with
socioeconomic peers. The city uses a peer index
because test scores are, typically, heavily
driven by demographics, and administrators feel
it is both more fair and more revealing to
compare schools serving poor children, for
example, with other schools serving poor
children.
This resulted in dozens of schools being awarded
A’s, even though more than half of their students
failed English, for example. With the influence
of peer groups taken out, 66 schools that earned
a B would have jumped to the A level.
Finally, a fourth grading method combined the
previous two: The formula was changed to
emphasize performance more than improvement, and
peer comparisons were discarded.
This pushed even more B schools to the A level,
and even more significantly reshaped the pool of
failing schools. Seven F schools would have
scored B’s under this method.
— Robert Gebeloff
New York Times
2008-09-27
INDEX OF OUTRAGES
Pages: 380
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