General News
Grading the DOE report card
Mar 27, 2008 11:53 AM
UFT President Randi Weingarten offers her critique of the DOE’s school report cards in a roundtable discussion that also included Ernest Logan (center), president of the principals’ union, and NYU testing expert Bob Tobias.
UFT President Randi Weingarten, Council of School Supervisors and Administrators President Ernest Logan and New York University testing expert Bob Tobias headed a roundtable discussion at the Public Education Grantmakers Network on March 5 to discuss the Department of Education’s School Progress Reports.
The Grantmakers, who oversee charitable donations to public schools, expressed frustration and confusion over the DOE’s school grading system. It overemphasizes test scores, they said, and is often at odds with state accountability systems.
Weingarten said the UFT embraces accountability but the DOE reports fall short. “I’m OK with accountability,” she told the group, “but we’re not getting it right.”
She said district and central accountability for schools was missing from the DOE reports. In addition, she called for better checks and balances so that no one measure can skew the grade. Only when school accountability is “fair, accurate and transparent,” she said, “can we help teachers view data as their ally.”
NYU’s Tobias told the Grantmakers that the school system has always ranked schools, usually by reading and math scores, though in the past the main audience was real estate agents. But “schools are very complex organizations and you need lots of information” to truly evaluate a school’s impact on student learning, he said. The new DOE reports, “are not ready for prime time.”
