Brilliant proposals are often undermined through less-than brilliant execution. That is clearly the case in New York, where Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s new system for rating the city’s public schools has come under withering fire from across the political spectrum.
Mr. Bloomberg should preserve the heart of the new system. It does a valuable service to students, and teachers, by holding schools accountable for both overall performance and for how much progress students make from one year to the next. But Mr. Bloomberg should ditch the simplistic and counterproductive A through F rating system. It boils down the entire shooting match to a single letter grade that does not convey the full weight of this approach and lends itself to tabloid headlines instead of a real look at a school’s problems.
The city’s new rating system is part of growing national trend toward the use of so-called “growth models” in education. These models, now being tested in several states, try to create a cumulative portrait of each student’s progress through school as a way of identifying successful schools and successful teaching strategies.
The New York version places a heavy emphasis on how much individual students improve on state tests from one year to the next. Schools are judged not only on general achievement levels but on how much their students improve compared with students in similarly situated schools across the city. The system focuses especially on how well schools do helping their lowest-achieving students do better.
These are all important things for educators to know. And schools that fail to sustain educational gains from one year to the next should certainly be called to account and required to do better. But the practice of giving, say, an F, to an otherwise high-performing school that lags in student improvement for a single year stigmatizes the entire school and angers parents. It also shakes the public’s faith in the evaluation system.
The city’s focus on student improvement is commendable. But even commendable aims followed out the window can yield misleading and distorted results. For example, people all over the city were understandably skeptical when a high-performing school was given an F and several low-performing schools — those actually on the state’s failing list — were given A’s and B’s.
Beyond that, people who know the growth models well were displeased to learn that New York’s first crack at the system for elementary and middle schools was based on a single year’s test data, instead of the accepted standard of three years.
Mayor Bloomberg did the right thing by embracing the growth model for New York’s enormous and complicated public school system at a time when many areas of the country have yet to move on the issue. It was especially important to make clear that student progress really counts.
But while it tinkers with this system, the city should come up with a way to emphasize student progress without needlessly stigmatizing entire schools and communities. That means replacing the A through F system with a more subtle and flexible one.
