Explaining Why Florida’s School Grade System is Fatally Flawed and Why Its Dooms Parent Trigger
Matt Di Carlo didn’t know that the Florida Department of Education would be changing 213 school grades when he posted his data in a Shanker Institute blog post on Friday. A well-respected senior research fellow, Dr. Di Carlo effectively shows that Florida’s school grad formula reveals that a remarkable correlation exists between poverty and of performance. But that it shouldn’t have done so in such an absolute fashion. Consider this from Di Carlo:
In the scatterplot below, each dot is an elementary or middle school (almost 3,000 in total; ratings are pending for any schools that serve high school grades). The vertical axis is the number of points the school received (0-800; these points are sorted into A-F letter grades), while the horizontal axis is the percent of the schools’ students receiving subsidized lunch, a rough proxy for poverty.
This is a fairly strong relationship. You can see that the number of points schools receive tends to decline as poverty increases. That’s not at all surprising, of course – Florida’s system relies