Considering the barrage of newfangled performance metrics students now face at school, it’s difficult to understand how the General Assembly could think the old-fashioned, five-letter grading scale would be sufficient to provide a clear picture of the performance of schools themselves.
The correlation between those schools which received Ds and Fs — nearly one third — and the poverty of their student populations is striking. Poverty rates at F schools uniformly top 50 percent. The same was true of 97.9 percent of schools that received a D.
More troubling still have been the conclusions legislators seem to have drawn from the school report cards.
“If I’m a principal of a D school or an F school, I’m going to bust my fanny not to be (on that list) again next year,” said Sen. Jerry Tillman, R-Moore, in an interview with NPR’s All Things Considered.
Tillman’s words imply a frightening unwillingness to grapple with what actually causes schools to underperform. He and others in the General Assembly seem to believe that bad schools are bad because their teachers simply aren’t working hard enough, that failing grades will shake them out of their stupors.
In reality, it is these teachers who are forced to work hardest to deal with large class sizes, meager resources and the expectation of producing adequate test scores from students who likely receive little academic support outside the classroom.
State Superintendent June Atkinson has said the scores are a quick way to determine where resources need to go. This much is certainly true, although a quick look at school budgets would have yielded nearly identical results.
But Atkinson’s good intentions stand little chance against a metric that seems to have been devised to place the burden on poorer schools to do more with less by a General Assembly that seems intent on making the bleak evaluation of the state’s public schools a self-fulfilling prophesy.
As applied this year, only one-fifth of a school’s grade is derived from its students’ progress. The remaining 80 percent is based on standardized testing. Tom Forcella, the superintendent of Chapel Hill-Carrboro City schools, has called for a greater emphasis on student growth from one year to the next in school evaluation, even though his district is among the highest-achieving in the state in absolute terms.
