Superintendent John White’s system for grading schools is
about to get really crazy.
With his latest proposed revision of school accountability
guidelines to BESE, White attempts to reassure school principals by temporarily
grading schools on a curve as more difficult tests are given to students. White
explains that for the 2014-15 and 2015-16 school years, the relative number of
A, B, C, D, and F schools will remain the same as 2013-14. At the same time however, under Whites new
rules all principals are expected to improve their school performance scores each year. But that’s impossible if the schools are being graded on a curve.
The only way for one school to have its score go up is for another school score
to go down. This system is inherently unfair.
Whites new proposals for school accountability are coming as
requirements tacked on to the Act 240 subcommittee report. Act 240 was a bill passed by Rep. Hoffmann
for the purpose of improving the teacher evaluation system. But as I explain in
the post below, the subcommittee report was manipulated by White to require
that all school principals set a goal of raising their school performance
scores every year. In addition, the
principal’s quantitative evaluation will be based only on the school
performance score. But it is impossible for all schools (or even more than
half) to improve their performance scores if the schools are being graded on a
curve.
With these two opposing rules, White is guaranteeing, based
on statistics that approximately 50% of our public schools will have a lower
SPS for this school year and the next school year. The declining schools may be
different each year, but when graded on the curve, approximately 50% must
decline. So the quantitative portion of the evaluation of half of our
principals will have to go down for those two years.
In addition one of the new rules proposed by White that was
not considered by the Act 240 subcommittee, requires that the local
superintendents be shamed by submitting a report to BESE on any school that has
a decline in SPS for two years in a row. (White had a more embarrassing rule
for 3 consecutive SPS declines, but it has disappeared from the recommendations
to BESE)
How do these new rules affect teachers? What White is
driving at is forcing principals to demand that student test scores go up in
every classroom each year. White and his friends at LABI and CABL believe
that they have finally found a formula that will either drive up student scores
or get more teachers and principals fired. What the new rules will do
is to force teachers to spend more and more time on test prep instead of real
teaching.
The new rules for school accountability and for principal
evaluation are in contradiction and impossible to administer fairly. Please ask
BESE to send White back to the drawing board before adopting any rules that put
principals and teachers in an impossible predicament. (Click here for BESE districtmaps and email addresses) Such rules will only further demoralize the education
profession and will not benefit our students in any way.
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