Senate votes to keep stigmatizing poor schools
Published May 13, 2015
by Chris Fitzsimon, NC Policy Watch and NC SPIN panelist, May 12, 2015.
Lost in all the buzz in Raleigh about the surprising state revenue surplus was a vote last week in the Senate to continue to stigmatize public schools with high percentages of low-income students and the teachers who work hard every day trying to help them.
During debate last Thursday to continue the current 15 point A-F grading system for public schools, Senate leaders refused to allow any discussion on an amendment by Sen. Josh Stein to adjust how the grading system works.
Currently 80 percent of a school’s letter grade is determined by student performance on a standardized test and 20 percent by the improvement in test scores from year to year.
When the school letter grades were released for the first time earlier this year 97.9 percent of the schools that received a D or F had more than 50 percent of their students eligible for free or reduced lunch. Many of those schools saw improvements on test scores but received a poor grade nonetheless and were branded a failure in their communities.
Education advocates and legislators of both political parties have acknowledged the formula is flawed and needs to be adjusted to give more weight to how much students improve. Otherwise low-income schools will always struggle to achieve a high grade no matter how much progress they make.
The A-F grading system is not new. It’s already in place in several states thanks to education “reformers,” though its inherent problems are already prompting changes. The Republican General Assembly in Virginia recently repealed the A-F grading system outright.
Stein’s amendment would have changed the way the grade is calculated, basing 50 percent of it on test scores and 50 percent on year to year improvement. That’s the exact approach mentioned by several Republican lawmakers and supported by many advocates for education as a first step toward improving the punitive system.
But Senate Rules Chair Tom Apodaca used a parliamentary move to bury Stein’s amendment with no debate at all, saying he hadn’t heard any complaints from parents and only a few objections from teachers and principals.
The Senate voted along party lines with Apodaca to table Stein’s proposal, making it all but certain that when the grades are released next year, low-income schools and the teachers who work there will once again be told they are failures, no matter how hard they are working or how many of students improve academically.
The ranking doesn’t really grade schools at all, it simply notes which schools have a lot of low-income students. It also doesn’t prompt more funding from the state or teams of experts to help the struggling the students.
The only thing the D or F grade triggers at a school is a letter to every student’s parents informing them that the school received a low grade.
It almost makes you wonder about the motivation behind the program. Is it simply to give parents more information or is it to give them another reason to leave the traditional public school system for charters or private schools supported by taxpayer-funded vouchers?
It’s hard not to be suspicious when Senate leaders won’t even allow a discussion about making the system fairer to students and teachers, not to mention the lack of any meaningful response to low grades.
The schools don’t get extra help. The teachers don’t get smaller classes or more support. They all just get branded with a demoralizing F— just the way Apodaca and his colleagues in the Senate leadership apparently want it.
May 13, 2015 at 8:01 am
Frank Burns says:
The low performing schools stigmatize themselves with poor results and changing the ranking scale to make those students appear better than they are is not helpful. The problem is not the teachers, the problem is the lack of discipline in the classroom. Students are allowed to have cell phones in the classroom and texting each other and nobody is paying attention to the teachers. Parents, administrators and the latest villian (child advocacy lawyers) are intervening and nobody gives the teachers respect or authority. Until schools improve the learning environment by punishing and removing students who disrupt classrooms, no amount of money or bogus ranking systems, will fix the schools.
May 13, 2015 at 9:13 am
Richard L Bunce says:
Wouldn't want to hurt the feeling of traditional government education bureaucrats no matter how poorly they are doing their assigned task... educating students. Forget this nonsense and just provide every parent a real choice in their students education.
