My School Got a B... Huh?

There has been much criticism over the school report cards that were released last week. Setting aside the ridiculousness of judging a school almost entirely on standardized test scores, and only one year's worth at that, many have criticized this new system for failing good schools. What about criticizing the bad schools that were passed? How on earth did my school get a B?

I guess it's not that surprising. My principal has managed to underreport almost all discipline issues. We haven't yet had a graduating class so that couldn't factor in. The school environment survey results were decent, though the survey didn't ask some important questions, like how well special education students and ELL's are being served. Nor did it ask much about order and discipline -- only "safety". And, I know many teachers who didn't fill out their survey because of the bar code which could have identified them. Well, my school is pretty safe for its neighborhood (in the most basic sense that they won't get killed or raped or anything), but that doesn't mean the teachers are able to teach over talkative and disruptive students.

Anyway. The biggest factor in our good report card grade -- test scores -- also makes sense. Only a select subset of students were allowed to take the Regents exams, so of course our scores were higher than in reality. In reality, only 1/3 of the students even took any given Regents last year! Did they factor this in at all?!?!

This all makes me wonder how political these report card grades are. These are just my cursory impressions, but I see that many, many of these new small schools (many are under the so-called Empowerment Zone) have A's and B's, while larger traditional high schools with good reputations got B's and C's. Klein said something to this effect in the Times article:

Mr. Bloomberg called the school system a “poster child” for urban school reform, and said the grades validated some of his major changes. He said that “empowerment schools,” whose principals had more freedom over decisions like what they teach and how they spend their money, earned more A’s than other schools.

It would be interesting to correlate how many of the new small schools are also Empowerment schools, which Bloomberg is touting as the cornerstone in his efforts to improve the system. Well, the new small schools simply don't have as much data to report yet, and from what I've seen have been highly adept at covering up information, while the larger high schools have been inundated with all the Special Ed and ELL kids. Of course their test scores will be lower! Is it just me, or does it seem like there's something really wrong with this picture, where Bloomberg is using his own report card grades to justify all his own reforms?

Either I have a skewed perspective of my own school and it's actually not that bad compared with its peers (to be honest, it is a terrifying thought that there are that there might be that many schools that are so much worse than mine), or there is quite a bit of inflation of numbers, twisting of data, and grade manipulation going on here to make some schools look better than others for various political reasons.