What’s Wrong with School Grades, and What We Can Do about It
In Arkansas, we give bonus money to schools that get good grades. This performance-based incentive is called the Arkansas School Recognition Program. Unfortunately, these incentives depend on a terribly flawed & harmful school-grading rubric developed by the Arkansas Department of Education to align with a federal law called the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA.)
Our ESSA Index scores give us a School Report Card every year, sorting schools by the familiar letter grades A, B, C, D, and F. The Arkansas Department of Education (ADE) has published a PowerPoint explanation of the school grading system for 2018. (Be warned: It’s 48 pages long.) Here’s one of the slides:
Okay, did you get it? Because if you did, you’re way ahead of me. In the process of studying our ESSA index scoring system, I have woefully failed my family in housework, child care, and “fun mom” status. Seriously, ask my husband. I’ve been a nonentity in our house these past couple weeks, trying to figure this out.
The Arkansas school grading system is complicated. Unfortunately, the fact that so few of us really keep track of how the ADE is grading our schools gives cover to charlatans who take advantage of the financial incentives to reward themselves for shady behavior (that’s my blog post about our “number one” school, its IRS forms, and its enrollment numbers) and to school privatization and re-segregation efforts that are sweeping the nation as well as our state.
Our ignorance also smooths the way for inadequate — even discriminatory — school grading practices. Assigning unwarranted “D” and “F” grades to schools drives demoralized teachers out of the profession in a state that already has a teacher shortage, and invites privateers to come in and “fix” our schools while skimming profits off our highest-risk children.
So let’s educate ourselves! Here’s how I understand the current school grading system in Arkansas, with some commentary on how it’s problematic, plus suggestions on how to make it better.
Right now, the Arkansas Department of Education (ADE) uses the ACT-Aspire test (developed by the ACT® and Pearson) to measure “Weighted Achievement” and “Academic Growth” in math and literacy for all Arkansas public school students. Achievement scores are closely tied to poverty levels and race among test-takers. Growth scores, however, attempt to remove the effects of poverty and race on test scores by tracking individual students from one year to the next — even if they transfer schools — comparing each student only to his/her previous scores.
Every public school in Arkansas, from Kindergarten to 12th grade, is primarily judged by the ACT-Aspire “Achievement” and “Growth” math/literacy scores of its students. In K-8 schools, these ACT-Aspire math/literacy scores combine to equal 85% of the total school grade.
In this graphic, the ACT-Aspire math/literacy scores (which make up 85% of the ESSA index for K-8 schools) are represented by two books: Achievement and Growth, at 35% and 50%, respectively.
What is the apple on top?
The apple on top is the other 15% of the ESSA index. The Arkansas Department of Education (ADE) calls this component the “School Quality and Student Success” (SQSS) indicator. In K-8 schools, the SQSS indicator is really just more ACT-Aspire “Achievement” (Reading at Grade Level and Science Achievement) and “Growth” (Growth in Science Achievement) scores, with 1/4 of the SQSS apple reserved for “Student Engagement,” a euphemism for attendance. Attendance is the only element of a K-8 school’s current ADE grade that is not directly linked to students’ performance on the ACT-Aspire test, and attendance only counts for 3.75% of a school’s grade.
We have handed over 96.25% of the responsibility to judge Arkansas K-8 schools’ effectiveness to an outside company. This company, Pearson Education, judges our schools to be in distress, then swoops in with charter school “solutions” to sell to us. These new charter schools are no better (and often demonstrably worse) than our public schools. We are Dr. Seuss’ sneetches on the beaches, and Pearson is our Dr. Sylvester McMonkey McBean (if you know what I mean.)
The ADE grades high schools differently from K-8 schools. As you can see from this graphic, the high school SQSS apple (still worth only 15% of a school’s grade) has a new, purple, section I call “GPA and course credits.” This purple section includes Grade Point Average (GPA) on a 4.0 scale, timely course credit completion, whether students are completing Advanced Placement/International Baccalaureate/concurrent college credit classes as part of their high school experience, whether students are completing classes in computer science, and whether students are completing 75 hours of community service for class credit.
High schools also have a second, golden, apple factored into their “school grade” score: Graduation Rate. A high school’s graduation rate (15% of their total ESSA index score) is NOT a simple yes/no per student, as you might expect. Instead, schools only get full credit for students who graduate in four years or less. If schools choose to do remedial work with students based on poor “Achievement” scores (which, you remember, are linked to poverty, language barriers, and racial issues) they get docked 50% for each student who repeats a year of high school for this remediation.
Basically, the ADE “graduation rate” score, as it’s currently calculated, is just another measure of “Achievement” based on demographics, rather than a descriptor of a high school’s effectiveness. In the real world, there is no way for an employer to know whether it took you four years or five years to graduate from high school. All they care about is whether you graduated from high school at all.
~PROBLEM 1: Achievement scores are linked more to student demographics than to school effectiveness. Achievement scores measure what kids already know — not how well they are learning. If we reward students’ achievement by sending extra money to their teachers, we punish the educators that are doing the hardest work — working with students who need the most help. It’s a direct disincentive for quality teachers to invest in children with the fewest resources. Frankly, it’s an outdated approach, more appropriate to the old “No Child Left Behind” law than to the intentions of ESSA.
However, it’s Achievement scores that currently have the greatest impact on Arkansas school grades. If you compare “Overall ESSA Index Scores” for each school in the poorly-graded Little Rock School District (LRSD) with the scores for student growth, achievement, and the SQSS “apple” indicator, it’s easy to see that student growth (the one indicator that really tries to eliminate questions of race and poverty) is fairly consistent across the district — staying right around the state average score of 79.74 — even though the school “grades” fluctuate wildly from school to school in conjunction with student achievement scores.
Bottom line: Teachers are teaching and children are learning, in every one of these schools. Why, then, are so many of Little Rock’s schools assigned failing grades? Demographics. We are punishing schools for our own larger social issues.
~PROBLEM 2: The “Reading at Grade Level” portion of a school’s SQSS score does not include accommodations for students with special needs. An eighth-grader whose brain was deprived of oxygen during a traumatic birth might only have an IQ of 50. Their normal school day might consist of repeated lessons on how to cross the street safely or how to read simple words like “bat” and “cat” and their own name. But since they aren’t able to read “To Kill a Mockingbird” with the rest of their class, their school gets a lower grade overall.
Keep in mind: 12% of Arkansas students are classified as “special needs” under the federal IDEA law. That’s 57,511 children who are “dragging down” our school grades, instead of getting better help.
~PROBLEM 3: Student attendance is beyond a teacher’s control, unless a school is willing to pay “supplemental duties” or “additional days” pay for the teacher to make home visits. Home visits are pretty much the only data-supported way for teachers to improve student attendance, but no Arkansas school district provides their teachers the support and pay to make home visits possible.
It’s illegal to suspend or expel students for truancy, so educators are trapped in a situation where they can’t do anything meaningful to improve attendance. Thus, the ACT-Aspire “Growth” results are the only reasonable indicator of K-8 educator performance that we use.
~PROBLEM 4: The makers of the ACT-Aspire test recommend NOT using their test scores as the only way a state evaluates schools or teachers.
Yet we, in Arkansas, insist on doing exactly that for our K-8 schools. Even the SQSS indicators (which are supposed to provide depth and balance to our school grades) still come from ACT-Aspire data.
~PROBLEM 5: Special Education (SPED) students count against a high school’s graduation rate. Arkansas requires public schools to provide a Free Appropriate Public Education to students with special needs from ages 3–21. However, if a student with special needs doesn’t graduate from high school in four or five years they are counted as not graduating at all.
When high schools get their grades docked for following the law and serving the best interests of students with special needs, we turn these children into ping pong balls that schools just try to bat away.
Many countries do not “grade” their schools. For example, European schools depend primarily on internal evaluations, with just a few European countries recently adding external evaluations to their requirements.
However, I recognize that we are probably not going to just stop grading our schools here in the United States. We’re on a very big boat going very fast. It’s much more realistic to change direction than to stop the momentum entirely.
In order to grade our schools more meaningfully, I suggest we steer our boat toward a new evaluation system. It’s not just me, either.
- FairTest (National Center for Fair and Open Testing) offers this Model Assessment System for High-Quality Learning for schools under ESSA.
- Jon Valant of the Brookings Institution writes: “A good summative rating — one that encourages constructive practices and evaluates schools by how they serve their communities rather than which communities they serve — is better than no summative rating, while no summative rating is better than a bad one.”
- Ed100 has a great online lesson about educator evaluations.
- Education Next offers a cautionary article about how we perceive school quality.
Honestly, everybody has their own ideas. My own wishlist for a better Arkansas school grading system includes:
- Class Size
- Vocational Training Course Completion
- Elective Course Offerings
- Counselor-to-Student Ratio
- Home Visits per Student
- Positive Health Outcomes
- Voter Registration for Students Age 18+ upon Completion of a Civics Class
- Grants Won for Schools by Their Administrators
- Ratio of Licensed Teachers to Unlicensed Teachers
- Building Habitability
- Student Test Scores from Criterion-Referenced Tests
- Student Survey Responses
- Teacher Survey Responses
- Parent Survey Responses
Public schools should serve their students and communities. Their students should be engaged, curious, respected, and encouraged to explore. No standardized test can effectively measure this kind of success. It’s time to design a better, more comprehensive school grading system!
