The Student Progress At KIPP Is Small And Dim (Clap Clap Clap Clap) Deep In The Heart Of Texas
Reformers love A-F school ratings. They think that giving a school a single letter grade will inform parents to make the best ‘choice’ of where they should send their child. The idea is that these ratings will improve schools in two ways: 1) When a school gets an F rating, the staff will stop being so lazy and negligent in the future so they can get their rating up to passing, and 2) Parents will ‘vote with their feet’ to ‘escape’ the ‘failing’ school which will cause that school to get closed down for under enrollment.
New York City used to have such a system and when the new mayor was elected I had a meeting with the accountability team at the NYC Department of Education to share my feelings about the A-F ratings. I said that I did not like them because they were based on some very sketchy statistics and that these crude calculations could improperly label a school as failing which would then become a self-fulfilling prophecy as the most motivated families flee that school. I was pleased to see, a year later, that New York City did abandon the A-F rating system.
But throughout the country, the A-F system is spreading. In the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) states are required to identify the bottom 5% of schools. It doesn’t demand an A-F system, but there definitely does have to be some sort of ranking to determine which The Student Progress At KIPP Is Small And Dim (Clap Clap Clap Clap) Deep In The Heart Of Texas | Gary Rubinstein's Blog:
