Some Texas schools and districts have raised their academic rankings without actually improving student scores on the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills, according to the Dallas Morning News, which files a terrific piece of reporting on the problem.
For example, TAKS reading scores slipped this year at Medrano Elementary School in Dallas. But under a new procedure granted by the Texas Education Agency, Dallas school officials expect Medrano to rise from “acceptable” to the more impressive “recognized” when 2008 rankings come out in August….Critics say this bureaucratic sleight-of-hand can make schools look good on paper when many students still need help. Why, those critics ask, would school leaders strive to improve learning when they can use automatic loopholes as a means to elevate or maintain their ratings?
The paper quotes a Dallas associate superintendent who says, “There are so many measures in an urban district that we have to deal with. When a school gets rated lower because of one group, that is really demoralizing. It condemns the whole school because of one group.”
Am I missing something here? Isn’t the entire point of accountability to guarantee good outcomes for every group of students? Say what you will about NCLB, but redefining failure as success is most certainly not the way to go, as Ed Trust’s Daria Hall points out.
It’s this whole set of decisions that are being made in the interest of adults and not kids. It’s to make schools look better than they are, rather than confronting the fact that far too few students are doing reading or math or science at the level they should be.
So, the inverse is true in your argument. “Redefining success as a failure” is the way to go. Suppose that you had one demographic that pulled the school up? You are saying that this group should be discounted because they improved the school’s rating and offset the rating of the non-performing groups. It sounds like the strange factoid that “Smoking is the leading cause of statistics.”
I teach in a Title 1 school in Texas, and would teach nowhere else. But I’ve always wondered that if we redirected “measurement money” to actually improving curriculum, teacher training, and classroom supplies this argument would be even more pointless than it already is.
I’m not sure I follow your argument about redefining success as failure. I have issues with the unintended consequences of our test-driven accountability culture. It narrows the curriculum to an unacceptable degree, most notably. But I support the idea of a accountability in principle. And from that it stands to reason that if a school can dismiss the performance of a particular subgroup from its accountability measures, it lowers the bar for that subgroup. And isn’t that how we got into this mess in the first place?
Are the students reading fiction 2 hours a night at home? Until that happens, you can just forget improvement.
It’s all about the reading, stupid. And if it isn’t happening at home, and from the age of 4 on, on a daily basis and for long enough a period of time, nothing else the schools can do (except add 2 hours and have the students do their reading at school) is going to make any kind of sizable difference.
The schools aren’t failing the kids. The PARENTS are failing their kids.
Duh.