It goes to eleven
Monday, July 28th, 2008 By Mike Maurer
About those school report cards. Your district is rated in one of five categories. Excellent, effective, continuous improvement, academic watch, academic emergency. Once in awhile you’ll see these compared to grades, A, B, C, etc.
This is pure nonsense, a substitute for thought. Presumably it’s a shorthand, allowing parents and anyone else who is interested (usually people selling things to parents) to rank a school to the nearest good or bad, but it’s still nonsense. Maybe if the categories were excellent, good, average, poor, failing, then it might be worth something, but even then it’s not much use. Unless you’re able to say what the elements of these things include, it gives you no idea what is really happening, and worse, it gives you a false impression of what is truly relevant to your child or indeed any individual child.
What our federal, state and bureaucratic officers are doing mucking around in here bears no relation to any student’s performance. It does, however, relate closely to whether that politician or bureaucrat takes credit for the good things others do, while ensuring that the responsibility for the bad things lands elsewhere.
Each day George Bush, Ted Kennedy and the lot of them must wake up and think, “I was excellent yesterday, and I’m going to do be so again today.”
Tags: Education, no child left behind, report card
July 28th, 2008 at 10:32 am
Actually, the “excellent”, “Continuous Improvement” etc is a child of the Ohio Legislature. President Bush and Senator Kennedy gave us No Child Left Behind that can artifically muck with the ratings. Ohio also gave us “Value Add”, a poorly named but more accurate indicator of school district success because it takes into account the raw material the school had to start with. We also have the Performance Index which takes into account not only how many kids passed, but in general, how well they did. The data is out there if only our society (and the press, a reflection of our society) cared enough to look.