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Teachers’ hard work helps raise Progress Report grades
Sep 25, 2008 4:07 PM
Schools Chancellor Joel Klein (left) and Mayor Michael Bloomberg announce results of the Progress Report grades.
The increases in math and reading test scores announced in June have led to 58 percent of the city’s 1,043 elementary and middle schools moving up one letter grade or getting an A for the second year in a row in the Department of Education’s second annual Progress Reports.
Noting that not a single school that failed last year failed again this year, Mayor Bloomberg announced the latest school grades on Sept. 16 at PS 5 in Bedford-Stuyvesant, one of nine schools that made the stunning leap from F in 2006-2007 to A in 2007-2008. Eighteen of last year’s F schools have been promoted to B status.
Additionally, 71 percent of schools with C or D ratings last year moved up to Bs this year. The percentage of A-rated schools rose to 38 percent this year, up from 23 percent last year.
“Given the large role that test scores play in the Progress Reports grades, it isn’t surprising to see the number of schools that got As or Bs and the decline in the number that got Ds or Fs,” UFT President Randi Weingarten observed. “In any case, these results show that our hard-working teachers are succeeding in moving schools forward.”
She also noted that the most successful schools are those where collaboration between educators and administrators is strong.
Bloomberg credited the UFT and Weingarten, among others, for suggestions that improved this year’s assessment system and “for helping us reach this day.”
While schools continue to get a single, overall A-F letter grade, for the first time this year schools also got letter grades for the three subcategories that make up the overall grade: school environment, which accounts for 15 percent, student performance for 25 percent and student progress for 60 percent.
Weingarten expressed concern that 85 percent of each school’s grade is still based on standardized test scores and that all the work that teachers do in their classrooms is ultimately being conflated to a single grade.
The change that provides grades in each of the three categories follows the UFT’s call for more fairness and transparency and for multiple measures of school success after the first Progress Reports were announced last year. The UFT had proposed an alternative evaluation system that would include academic achievement, a safe and orderly learning environment, teamwork for student achievement as well as DOE accountability.
Despite the dramatic improvement in school ratings, some question whether things are really getting better. There is concern about the wide swing in grades from last year to this year, especially the 75 percent of failing schools last year that are now graded A or B.
Jennifer Jennings, the widely read Education Week blogger who writes under the name Eduwonkette, argued on her blog that the school Progress Report grades may not be reliable and valid. She noted that there was significant variation in the measure of academic progress — the most important of the three measures used to establish the grades — between the 2006-07 and 2007-08 school years. Such a dramatic disparity is best understood, Jennings wrote, as measurement error — statistical noise from a poorly designed measure that tells us nothing about the actual state of learning in schools. Since progress measures account for 60 percent of a school’s grade, it throws into serious question the overall grades of the school Progress Reports, Jennings contended.
Critics also questioned the disparity in DOE, federal and state accountability measures.
For instance, 30 percent of schools labeled failures according to No Child Left Behind got As from the DOE and 16 of 18 schools that the DOE labeled F are in good standing on the federal reports.
Likewise, PS 92 in the Bronx, a school that went from A to F, got a “well developed” on the DOE’s School Quality Review and was described by evaluators as a “vibrant, energetic and inclusive child-centered school” that “uses standardized tests and other measures to gain a good understanding of individual students, classes and the school as a whole.”
About the DOE Progress Reports, Weingarten said, “We still need to know more about how these grades are affected by other factors such as large class sizes and school overcrowding.”
James Liebman, the DOE’s chief accountability officer and architect of the grading system, dismissed class size as a factor in a school’s success or failure.
This year’s grades will again determine who wins and who loses. Schools that receive As can receive extra money, while teachers in schools participating in the schoolwide bonus program that receive As are eligible for bonuses. Schools that get a D or F two years in a row face the possibility of losing their principal or being closed down.
The Progress Reports will be distributed to families at parent-teacher conferences this fall and are also available on the DOE Web site at www.nyc.gov/schools.
Because Regents scores and summer school results must be factored into the ratings for high schools, those Progress Reports will be announced later this fall.
