State School Rankings and School Report Cards Drive Racial and Economic Segregation
The federal Every Student Succeeds Act, passed in 2015 to replace No Child Left Behind, requires states to provide school report cards as an accountability tool. The promotional materials from the U.S. Department of Education describe state report cards as a resource for parents—a way to help them know the quality of their child’s school. The report cards must include at least the school’s aggregate standardized test scores, and if the school is a secondary school, its graduation rate. Overall grades are not federally required, but many states now assign overall summative ratings. But instead of a valuable resource about the quality of particular public schools, the report cards and the rankings and ratings that frequently accompany them have become racist dog whistles telling parents just which schools serve homogeneous, privileged student populations. Websites like Zillow publish the school ratings as part of real estate advertising.
Even though they are used these days by policy makers for evaluating the quality of public schools, standardized test scores are known to be a poor yardstick for measuring school quality. And high school graduation rates reflect many factors beyond school quality. Research demonstrates that the report cards and test-based accountability in general simply brand schools in the poorest communities—schools that may be doing a good job—as failures. The damage is made more serious when states assign letter grades—“A”, “B”, “C”, “D”, and “F”. A school’s poor grade makes it easier for the public to condemn the “F” rated school and the community that surrounds it. Some states have even begun ranking school districts according to their letter grades. Widespread school funding inequity compounds the problem, as wealthy enclaves can raise adequate funding locally, while the poorest school districts remain dependent on state funding, which has fallen precipitously in many places in the decade since the Great Recession
Furman University education professor and blogger about racial injustice in education, Paul Thomas recently published a critique of South Carolina’s school rankings. Thomas quotes South Carolina newspapers bragging about two top-ranked schools—Academic Magnet High, and the elite Brockman Elementary School. Here is what Thomas discovered when he did CONTINUE READING: State School Rankings and School Report Cards Drive Racial and Economic Segregation | janresseger
