Submitted by Gideon Primo, Dec 20, 2007 00:14

While Diane Ravitch raises some good points about the validity of grades awarded to already high performing schools, her message about overall accountability for city schools is unclear. How would she propose holding schools accountable for performance? Frankly, I'm just not too worried about stigmatizing the already high performing schools; it's the schools that fail students year after year that deserve scrutiny. The DOE chose to weight student growth more heavily in its accountability system which explains why low performing schools could get a high grade; it means they are taking kids with very low levels of performance and boosting them up.

On another point Ravitch is simply not correct: the DOE evaluation system did not dictate school closures. It is my understanding that the city did not close all schools which received a D or an F; in fact, DOE closed relatively few schools this year and those schools had a long track record of failure, not just one year's failing grade. While there are valid criticisms of the methodology used to determine the overall school grades, the closure of these schools should not be blamed solely on the new accountability system, it was just one more nail in the coffin of schools that probably should have been shuttered long ago.

Finally, Ravitch states that "More than half of the nearly 400 schools that the state or federal government has identified as academically weak received an A or a B" as if this proves the DOE system is faulty. The state and federal NCLB accountability system uses different measures and it may very well be that their assessment of schools is more off the mark than the DOE's system. Has she looked at how many truly terrible schools are in good standing under the state's accountability system?

I think a single grade is a crude way to judge a school, just as a single grade tells you little about what a students knows and can do in a certain subject. That said, these grades are forcing school staff, parents and the public to engage with some complicated data and to look not only at overall performance, but at student growth and school environment as well. Hopefully some good will come of it in getting us all to consider what makes a school good enough to send our kids to.

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