The state gets an ‘I’ for incomplete

By Dr. Andre M. Perry
Contributing Columnist

The Louisiana Department of Education released the 2011 school performance scores and its new letter grading system. Letter grades are supposed to provide parents with a familiar and accessible way to understand how schools are performing. Just as a child is graded on multiple subjects, the complexity of school performance shouldn’t be encapsulated in a single grade. As a result, the new grading system is likely to produce a scarlet letter effect more than an analytic means of comparison.

When a child gets a report card, he or she receives grades in various disciplines and behaviors, which paint a picture of how he or she is doing in school. The grade point average provides a general perspective, but a student’s proclivities, growth and talents are understood by looking at specific subject areas over time.

In the state’s efforts to provide parents with a common standard for comparison, they only offered a gross, inexact measure that does not reveal the very important details of how a school is performing. How should parents judge schools within the Recovery School District where 84 percent of the schools received a “D” or an “F” grade?

As an educator and researcher, I appreciate the notion that there should be a status report that shows where a school currently falls along a common continuum. However, the Recovery School District was built to reform schools and consequently should have a measure of how far a school has improved over time. Growth or “added value” grades should be given as part of a school’s overall report card.

Grades are only comparable when the schools are. In addition to academics as measured by standardized exams, overall high school grades are also built upon attendance, dropout and graduation rates. The state issued grades for high schools that did not have enough or any graduating classes because of their newness. Moreover, the schools that did have sufficient graduating classes and met certain benchmarks also received bonus points that new schools could not receive. There­fore, reform minded schools were penalized for being new.

So when a parent sees one high school with a “D” and another with a “B,” they have to assume that the “B” school is better when the reality is that they aren’t comparable institutions.

The state also placed itself in precarious situation where it may award charter management organizations that have multiple “D” grades in its portfolio with additional schools. How is that justifiable? It’s not, unless we issue multiple grades in the fashion of a report card.

It’s encouraging for the rest of the state that the majority of Recovery School District charters have shown they can move schools from a “F” to a “D,” but it’s discouraging that more providers have not re­ceived “B” or “A” grad­es. The catalyst for chan­ge may have been the competition between a diverse range of providers. Maybe we should continue to increase the number of different providers instead of scaling up organizations with “D” schools.

Shaming as a motivation for change can be effective but it almost always produces harmful unintended consequences. The current system effectively uses grades as scarlet letters instead of presenting information rich indicators that inform parents, school leaders and the public. Parents will undoubtedly react to the inexact letter grades by applying to the few full schools that have a “B” grades or higher only to be pushed back to their second or third choice by a new electronic enrollment system. But we will say this is a choice system.

The state must add letter grades that separately measure key components of school performance as part of a school report card. In the meantime, the state and individual school leaders must now explain the inaccurate grades without sounding like they’re offering excuses for them. Therefore, the state should be given an “I” for its incomplete efforts to measure school performance. But, following the their own practice, we’ll give them a “D” for their efforts.

This article was originally published in the October 10, 2011 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper