This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon, March 13, 2013 - If students get grades in school, should the schools get grades as well?
That’s the theory behind legislation that has been passed by the Missouri House but has received a mixed reception from education groups in the state.
Those in favor say that parents deserve a quick, reliable way to tell how an individual school is performing, and a letter grade would help them understand more easily than the detailed data available on the state education department’s website.
If anyone can tell at a glance what rating a restaurant gets, they say, shouldn’t a school be just as easy to judge?
“It’s important for parents to know that there may be schools they would want their children to move into,” says Lea Crusey, Missouri state director of StudentsFirst.
But those who are against the plan say that it is not simple but simplistic.
Taking a wide variety of complex measures and boiling them down into a single letter, A through F, could give a misleading view of how a school is doing, they say. And because the information that would determine the grade is already available, the letter grade is a needless duplication.
“If parents want information on schools,” says Don Senti, head of the Cooperating School Districts, “they can get it.”
What the bill says
The legislation, similar to grading laws enacted in other states, would take information that will be used in Missouri’s new school evaluation system, known as MSIP 5, and boil it down. MSIP 5 will rate school districts as accredited with distinction, accredited, provisional and unaccredited; individual schools would not be rated.
As originally introduced by state Rep. Kathryn Swan, R-Cape Girardeau, it would have taken the data from the five categories in the new plan – student achievement, subgroup achievement, attendance, graduation and college and career readiness – and determined a percentage score based on how many points a school earned out of how many were possible.
Then that percentage score would have been translated into a single letter grade for the school, based on the traditional scoring scale – 90-100 for an A, 80-89 for a B, and down to an F for anything less than 60 percent.
As it moved through the House, the bill changed. The version passed and sent to the Senate now calls for individual letter grades for each of the five categories, but no one letter grade that sums everything up.
Also included would be a link between the report card and the more detailed information on the website of the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education. The principal of each school would have the option of including a statement of 250 words or less that could provide context or better understanding of the letter grades.
DESE would be responsible for coming up with “rules establishing a report card that is easy for the general public to understand and contains information from the school improvement program that accurately reflects the performance level” of each individual school.
The first report cards would be due by Dec. 1, 2014.
While the bill now specifies that the report card would be used purely for information, not as part of a school’s evaluation, it does include a provision that any school scoring lower than 70 percent overall would have to file a plan detailing actions it plans to improve during the next school year.
Simple but not oversimplified
Backers of the bill as originally drafted hope that as it moves toward final approval, the single-letter grade that encompasses all five categories is restored. Crusey says that boiling down the large quantity of data in the MSIP5 report to a single letter does not present a false picture.
“The report card itself shows all of the subcategories,” she said, “with the number of points that can be earned and the number of points a school has earned. There is actually quite a good amount of good information. It is hard to argue that it is oversimplified.”
Testifying last month in favor of the bill, Kate Casas, state director of the Children’s Education Council of Missouri, said that given all of the time and effort that went into putting together the MSIP 5 plan, it makes sense to take the extra step and make the information available to the public in an easy-to-understand format.
“We feel that if schools are really interested in authentic parent and community involvement,” she told lawmakers, “then we are going to have to start telling parents and community members exactly how schools are performing.”
In an interview, she said that other states’ experience indicates that when individual schools and not just entire school districts have a grade that is widely distributed, they tend to get better.
In Florida, Casas said, since school report cards became available in 1999, “they now have more than three times the number of A and B schools than they did when they implemented the program.”
Talking to legislators, Casas said she heard fears that poorly rated schools may be stigmatized when their grades become public, particularly those in low-income areas. But she noted that the grades would be based not just on absolute scores but on improvement, so schools that are raising student achievement would be in the spotlight.
“I heard lots of legislators worry about how their schools might get D’s or Fs’,” Casas said. “But many of those same legislators told me last year their schools were so great, they don’t even need reform.”
Also appearing at a House hearing last month were parents whose testimonywas relayed by Casas’ council.
One of them, Tiffany Lewis, said she has five children in four different schools, some public and some private. She lives in St. Louis, she said, and has had a difficult time finding out what she needs to know to determine the best school for her kids. Her daughters, she said, enrolled at Imagine schools that were later shut down for poor performance, but she couldn’t see those shortcomings when she was investigating possible placement.
“I am a strong believer in parent choice and parent responsibility,” she said, “and I’m sure most of you are too. However, parent choice and parent responsibility can only work if you have informed parents.”
Don’t duplicate what’s already available
Opponents of the school-grading bill – including groups representing teachers and administrators as well as the St. Louis Public Schools and Cooperating School Districts – say parents already have enough data to be informed about how well a school is doing. Adding another layer, they say, won’t help.
Brent Ghan, spokesman for the Missouri School Boards Association, says that the changes made as the bill moved through the House make it less objectionable than it was before. But his group and others still feel it’s unnecessary.
“We felt like it was very difficult to capture the performance of a school building with a single letter grade,” he said. “That could be quite misleading.
“We’d rather not have the bill at all. DESE already has a great deal of information about the performance of school buildings on its website that people can use to review and compare buildings. That information is more detailed, but it’s also more meaningful than a single letter grade.”
Ghan says that boiling down all that detailed data into individual letters, or one summary letter, can be a disservice to schools and parents.
“The danger here is that we are making the evaluation of a school building overly simplistic,” he said. “You can see their point, that it takes a little more work to look at the data that is available, as opposed to a single letter grade. But it is more meaningful than a single letter grade.”
Senti, at Cooperating School Districts, says he attended a recent meeting with lawmakers and school officials and many of them wondered why such an added report card would be necessary.
He also questioned the often-repeated notion that school choice and competition, which could be heightened by the addition of letter grades for individual buildings, actually make schools better.
“The idea behind the grading system is that parents can see what the best schools are,” Senti said. “But while the whole idea of choice works very well in the private sector, it doesn’t work well in public schools. It doesn’t make schools any better. It can make them worse.
“The idea of competition in education generally doesn’t work, and I think in Missouri we’re starting to find that out.”
He noted that as a past superintendent in Parkway and Clayton, he has been a long-time supporter of the voluntary desegregation program, which lets black students in the city transfer to participating districts in St. Louis County. In that case, which involves widespread choice over a long period of time, having parents choose to enroll their children in suburban schools hasn’t led to much improvement in the city schools.
“Capitalism works if you’re talking about restaurants or clothing stores or barber shops,” Senti said. “There, people will tend to leave if service isn’t good. But it doesn’t work in public schools.”
The bottom line for Senti and Ghan is the fact that the information the school report cards would include is already available on the DESE website, so there’s no need to duplicate it.
“It’s not the worst bill in the world as far as we’re concerned,” Ghan said. “But it’s just unnecessary and does have the potential to be overly misleading and even simplistic in its evaluation of a school building’s performance.”