“A-F” School Ranking Systems—Exacerbating Racial Divisions and Inequality
Yesterday afternoon I spent five hours in Fort Wayne, Indiana at an interfaith gathering where nearly a hundred people discussed the challenges for public schools in a state that quite recently imposed a rash of corporatized, test-and-punish school reforms. Indiana has lots of new charter schools, a huge voucher program, and a very controversial, econometric, “A through F” rating system for its schools. The discussion heated up during a panel featuring the president of the local school board, the chair of the state senate committee on education, a member of the state board of education, the newspaper editor, a professor of urban education, a charter school principal, and the principal of a parochial school. Fortunately a skilled moderator kept the discussion moving.
The president of the Fort Wayne Board of Education bluntly explained how all these changes have affected particular neighborhood schools. He explained why the Fort Wayne Board of Education has refused to implement the “A through F” school rating system and wondered how the state could have imposed such a system that ruins the reputation of certain schools and neighborhoods by reinforcing racial and economic stereotyping and segregation.
It is in the context of the Fort Wayne school board president’s remarks that I have been
