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Grading education: How good are Charlottesville and Albemarle schools?

ABCs—and Ds and Fs
The Commonwealth began mandating school report cards in 1998 after a push from legislators for more accountability in the state’s education system. It was three years before the arrival of No Child Left Behind and the realization of Title I, the federal government’s funding program aimed at disadvantaged students.

At the time, some teachers and administrators complained that Virginia’s table- and test score-filled reports were too nuanced and too confusing to offer the average Virginian any useful information.

Fifteen years later, that argument was adopted by the pols pushing for a new layer of school assessment.

“Even highly involved parents don’t go to the school report cards,” said Virginia’s Deputy Secretary of Education Javaid Siddiqi. “The average parent just doesn’t have time to decode all of it.”

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By what percent did “gap group” students—economically disadvantaged, learning disabled, non-native English speaking—exceed federal minimum averages on reading tests?

Virginia’s school accountability system sometimes seems in conflict with itself, he said. A school that has won accreditation by meeting certain benchmarks might also be labeled a “focus school” because it’s lagging in some other area, Siddiqi said—a low graduation rate, for example, or a significant proficiency gap.

Siddiqi, who was a teacher, vice principal, and principal in the Chesterfield County School District before he joined McDonnell’s administration in 2011, said the point of the grading system is not to abandon nuance, but to add one more item to the assessment toolbox—one that compresses existing measures into an easy-to-understand scale that can help parents.

“We’re trying to take many different metrics and distill them down,” he said. “It’s simplifying the process, but we don’t see it as minimizing it.”

The grading system championed by McDonnell was initially structured solely around state accreditation—part of Virginia’s education landscape for decades—and standardized test scores. Schools would be awarded an A if they were accredited, demonstrated at least 25 percent of students were passing state tests at the advanced proficiency level, and met federal testing thresholds. Schools that were accredited but missed the mark on testing would get a B. C and D schools would be accredited, but with notably poor performance in one or more subject areas. No accreditation? F.

But after insistence from Democrats, the final bill also included language requiring the grading system take student improvement into account. Just how the state will do that remains unclear. It’s up to the Virginia Board of Education and the Department of Education to figure out the details, said Siddiqi—and they’ll have to work fast.

“Obviously, at this point it hasn’t really been fleshed out,” he said, but by this July, they’ll have to agree on how best to measure year-over-year improvement, so they can get a baseline and then roll out the first round of grades for Virginia schools in October 2014. “You can’t show student growth until you’ve given students time to grow,” he said.

There are instruments out there that schools can turn to, Saddiqi said, like the Measures of Academic Progress test offered by the nonprofit Northwest Evaluation Association. Which they choose will depend at least in part on cost; the state is currently soliciting bids.

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The McDonnell administration is well aware of the storm that’s been brewing over the new guidelines.

“I think it’s fair to say we’ve heard it all, on both sides of the argument,” Siddiqi said. But he thinks the state’s commitment to considering student improvement in the assessments undermines a lot of the opposition to the new grading system. And poorer districts that lack a lot of the resources of NoVA’s shiniest temples of secondary education will still get a fair shake, because the grading scale will be focused on core program requirements.

“We didn’t start giving extra kudos to schools that have STEM programs or multiple world language programs,” he said. “We didn’t include those things, because we wanted to have equity in the ability to access a letter grade of A.”

Siddiqi said he knows mandating a new assessment is a big deal.

“We recognize this is going to speak volumes to the local school communities,” he said. “The business partners, the community leaders, the students, teachers, stakeholders, and obviously the parents. People live in these schools, within these districts. We recognize the magnitude of the conversation. However, we also recognize there’s a mass of information out there, and it’s hard for people to decipher what’s really going on in their schools.”

The connotative power of a failing grade isn’t lost on the new system’s supporters, though. In fact, they’re counting on it.

“I can talk you through on the accreditation,” Siddiqi said. “I can run a web of confusing metrics. But that letter grade F—you just have to accept it, rather than talk through it.”

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