Complexity vs. comparability
But local educators and academic experts say school success isn’t simple to measure, and while trying to force it to look that way might play well in Richmond, it doesn’t do any real good to the most important constituents—students.
What too-simplistic assessments could do, said Atkins, is drive higher- and lower-performing schools even further apart. That’s what happened with the last major wave in school reform, she said.
With No Child Left Behind, “we created a system that only had punitive measures in place for schools that were consistently low-performing,” said Atkins. Take a closer look, and those communities would have a lot in common: low socioeconomic levels, mostly minority populations, and depressed housing markets. School assessment became a tool for description, but not reform.
Too often, that’s all standardized testing really tells you about students, said UVA sociology and education professor Paul Kingston: Rich or poor? Good home life or bad one?
“Schools with high scores tend to have kids from affluent, well-educated families,” said Kingston, a former Sociology Department chair who studies the link between educational attainment and social outcomes. “If you compare test scores, all you’re doing is indirectly measuring the family background of the kids attending that school. What’s not likely to appear is the answer to the question, ‘Does a school do better than you would predict, given the social constituency?’”
Atkins said slapping a label on an underperforming school doesn’t correct those disparities, but politicians persist in doing it. “Unfortunately, many of the policies that are being advocated now continue having these good schools and bad schools. Our lawmakers are making policies that tend to isolate one group on one side and the other.”
It doesn’t just not help, said Albemarle County Schools spokesman Phil Giaramita. It can widen the gap between high-performing districts and struggling ones. Letter grades send a clear message to anyone looking to relocate to a Virginia community—parents, but also businesses bringing economy-boosting jobs. They say one of two things: “Come here,” or “Stay away.”
“The division that’s labeled a D has an almost impossible task to get out of its category, because very few or no businesses will locate there,” Giaramita said. That means there are fewer opportunities to expand the tax base, and top teaching talent won’t want to relocate there, “so the D is a perpetual placement.”
The letter grade doesn’t change any of the assessment data that’s being gathered. People could make the same decisions based on information that’s already available, he said. “But by going to a superficial grading system, you make that decision much easier, and make it much less likely that a decision-maker will dig beneath the surface,” Giaramita said.
There is precedent for such a program. Florida instituted a school grading system in 1998 that served as the model for Virginia’s new program, and Louisiana followed suit in 2010—which was one reason both Jeb Bush and Bobby Jindal were in Richmond during McDonnell’s final push for Virginia’s grading bills. (The other, of course, being a presidential hopeful’s tendency to rally big party stars to his side for photo ops.) But the fact that experts and pols are still arguing about whether Florida’s grading system has helped schools 15 years later is evidence that it’s hard to measure the effects.
Some also question McDonnell’s assertion that grading schools makes them more accountable to choosy, tax-paying parents. Those who can afford the luxury of selecting their kid’s school are out touring and talking to other families, said city School Board member Ned Michie. The children who most need a watchdog making sure their schools help pull them up from a disadvantaged start don’t have that chance.
“It’s the parents who have choices are looking at these things, and not the ones in at-risk populations, where you just are where you are and can’t afford to move,” he said.
So if not A through F, then what?
Testing smarter?
“The question is how to create a system of evaluation that is both simple enough for people to understand and utilize, but also complex enough to get at what it is that schools should be doing for kids,” said Patrick Tolan, director of Youth-Nex, a cross-disciplinary center at UVA that takes a research-based approach to youth development.
Easier said than done, of course. It might be impossible to develop a single indicator by which to judge success, Tolan said. What we can do, he said, is focus more resources on applying the best practices we know work: training teachers in student engagement and classroom management, developing strong administrative leaders, making sure schools have up-to-date materials and technology, getting parents involved, and, maybe most importantly, creating an environment where kids believe they are capable of great things.
“If the school seems to create the conditions for learning, then it’s doing well, even if they’re not showing the same progress that other schools are,” Tolan said. “Education is a marathon, not a sprint.”
But there are alternative options for test-based accountability. Matt Haas, the Albemarle County Schools’ assistant superintendent for organization, is leading an effort to improve Albemarle’s student and teacher assessment, and in the process, attempting to find new ways to test for success. Virginia’s Standards of Learning are strong benchmarks, but testing for them can result in evaluation that’s “half an inch deep and a mile wide,” Haas said. Digging into how well certain programs perform within a school broadens the scope of assessment in a useful way, he said.
The county is also testing out an evaluation model that takes what’s called a “performance task approach” to measuring learning. Last year as part of a pilot study, a sampling of students took the College and Work Readiness Assessment, or CRWA. Designed by the New York City-based Council for Aid to Education, it presents students with a packet of materials they must process and use to make an argument or solve a problem, thereby testing critical thinking and analytical reasoning—better indicators of an educated student base than most standardized tests can get at, Haas said.
This concept isn’t new, but there’s a reason it’s not more widely used already, he said: “It’s more costly, and it’s more time consuming.”
For her part, Rosa Atkins is tired of treading over familiar ground. We should know by now, she said, that learning isn’t one-size-fits-all. Too much emphasis on comparability runs counter to a philosophy she said ought to be central in education: that schools should reflect the needs and values of the communities they serve. Ignore that, and you’ll only be pointing out and reinforcing disparities. “Children don’t need to be reminded that they’re poor,” she said. “They live it every day.”
Assessment isn’t inherently bad, Atkins said—a point stressed by other administrators and academics. A publicly funded compulsory education system must have oversight, transparency, and accountability. But we have to make sure we’re asking the right questions.
“When we start isolating communities and young people, and we’re talking about young people continuously as failures, we have a very dangerous situation,” she said. “We need a measure that holds everyone accountable, not one that separates us into good and bad.”