Let's settle an old debate.

AuthorHood, John
PositionFree & Clear

Arguments about how we judge the success of our public schools aren't new. It's time we found a system that reflects both performance and improvement.

What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again," we are told in the first chapter of the book of Ecclesiastes. "There is nothing new under the sun." I was thinking of this familiar verse--or perhaps just praying for divine deliverance--as I recently made my way through a high, teetering stack of old bill drafts, research reports and news clippings from the 1989 session of the North Carolina General Assembly.

What I sought was the legislative history of Senate Bill 2, which created the state's first comprehensive set of standardized tests and school report cards. You might have heard lately about proposals in Raleigh to change the way North Carolina's public schools are assessed. Back in February, the state for the first time applied letter grades to schools based on student performance. Even though the grading scale was quite generous --based on 15-point increments, rather than the usual 10-point scale --only 5% of schools got As, with 24% earning Bs, 41% earning Cs and 30% scoring Ds or Fs.

Not surprisingly, the release of the letter grades provoked significant controversy. Some tried to use them to score political points. For many school administrators and educators, the low grades simply demonstrated that the assessment system was unfair. Disadvantaged students typically fare worse on standardized tests, they pointed out, so schools with high concentrations of poor pupils can be expected to get low grades, and those with more affluent student bodies can be expected to get high grades, regardless of whether a school is adding any real value.

That's pretty much what happened. Some high-poverty schools earned high grades--for which they merit both praise and emulation --but most didn't. If you really want to know whether teachers and schools are succeeding, you have to look at the change in student test scores over the course of a year, not just the scores themselves. North Carolina's assessment already does that, actually. But the raw scores make up 80% of a school's letter grade while the change accounts for only 20%. Some lawmakers favor shifting the weights in the formula to 50% score and 50% change in score. Others want to introduce new variables, such as one focused on at-risk students, or issue two different letter grades--one showing how well the average student...

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