School Grades as Snake Oil That is Bad for Everyone (Round II)
A few years ago, I wrote a blog (see below) stating that school grading systems based on test scores, graduation rates, etc., are snake oil that does no one a lick of good. I just reread it and in hindsight it sounds incredibly naïve given that I was nowhere near strong enough in my condemnation of what is a truly terrible approach to trying to understand schools.
So, I’ll say it again here the way I wish I would’ve said it then: schools are perhaps the most critical of our public institutions and require a significant investment to run, and yet we choose to see them through a lens that doesn’t tell us the truth, and what it says is almost always guaranteed to be bad news. And we do that all for the cool price tag of several billion dollars a year on top of what we already spend on schools. And in Texas and 16 other states, school grades are loaded on top of that nonsense and then sold to the public as representing the truth about their schools.
It’s hard to invent a similar scenario given the level of its ridiculousness. You’d have to invent a group of people willing to take one of the biggest expenditures of taxpayer dollars on a mission-critical component of the country that the public is therefore desperate to understand and then imagine they choose to spend an additional billion or so on an accountability system that can’t help anybody understand anything but that is all but guaranteed to help the world question their investment by constantly putting it in a negative light. (A mouthful--sorry.)
The inventors of such a scenario should be summarily fired and prevented from ever expressing an opinion on the matter again. Instead, in public education those very inventors continue to double down on their approach and insist the problem is the educators themselves.
I’ve written at length (se below) about what the research instrument called a standardized test is designed to do and what it is not designed to do so I’ll encourage you to see my comments there. Suffice it say that using it to judge school quality would be like trying to pound a square peg into a round hole with a goldfish. Literally.
What I would also encourage you to do is ignore whatever grade (or label, or number of stars, or whatever) your state assigns to you. Whatever the grade, it says nothing about your effectiveness. Nada. Zilch. Zero. Zip. It won’t feel that way, I get it, but it’s the truth. Put the plaques in the trash. Tell the reporters that isn’t who you are. Don’t say anything on social media--especially if the state said nice things--you'll see why in a minute.
I can show you why you should do that using graduation rates since they are a little easier to see than test scores, but the principle is the same.
It’s reasonable to think of the graduation rate for a school as consisting of two broad categories of students: those who would graduate regardless of the high school they attend, and those who are at risk of dropping out. Now imagine two high schools. In the first nearly 100% of the students graduate year in and year out and would graduate regardless of the high school they attended, but they just happen to all live in the same middle to upper class neighborhood. In that case the graduation rate happens despite the school, not because of it. It may be an effective school in other ways, or it may not, but you’d have to look at those areas to make that determination. What the school cannot be said to do is contribute much in the way of the graduation rate, which is not a criticism of the school or its efforts, but a statement about the school’s locale.
Now imagine a second school with an 85% graduation rate in which half of the graduating seniors were at serious risk of not graduating as were, of course, all of those who did not graduate. The facts there would be clear: that school should be seen as being reasonably effective at moving at risk students towards the goal of graduation, and the school should continue with those efforts. But the fact remains that 15% of the students are still missing the opportunity to graduate and the school will need to find additional tools and methodologies to recover as many of those students as possible going forward.
But what would be totally inappropriate would be to declare the school a failure at graduating students. That would put the efforts that are working at risk of being dismissed as part of the purported failure and make the school less effective than it was before, harming the students. It would fail to do give the appropriate credit where credit is due and to communicate clearly where efforts will be needed going forward. It would make it harder to graduate students going forward, not easier.
Here’s something else to consider: the second school has very little if anything to learn from the first. The difference in the number of at risk students between the schools is due to demographic differences, and the help the second school needs is not an area the first school addresses much if ever.
What that also means is that should the first school experience a shift in demographics and now need to understand how best to serve at risk students, the second school will offer some opportunities for best practice. Of course, conditioned as we are to think that the higher the graduation rate the better the school at graduating students (or the higher the test scores the better the school, etc.), that is exactly the opposite of what most people would think. But the truth is the truth, and that without those underlying truths improvement will become impossible.
If we make the crude, naïve, and stupid mistake of drawing a line in the sand at say 90% and insist that schools above that line are effective at graduating students and schools below are ineffective, think of the harm that does to the schools and to the overall system, not to mention the students. The first school would receive a passing grade for its efforts and be considered as a model at graduating students when that is simply not the case. The second school would receive a failing grade for its efforts and be told that it is being terribly ineffective at achieving educational goals for its students. It certainly would not be considered a model for anything, and any attempt by the administrators in the school to accurately and truthfully declare where they were and we’re not effective would look to the world like excuses for poor performance. Any attempts not to change what they believed to be working would be met with suspicion. In the end, the students would be the ones who suffered.
Think of what just happened because of that compliance line of 90% (or what would happen with any similar compliance line, e.g., percentage of students passing a test, or having higher test scores, etc.).
Number one, we just lost the opportunity to identify best practice. That is an incredibly dangerous thing to have happen in any profession or organization, because it makes improvement almost impossible. Best practice existed at the second school in some of what it was doing to graduate a significant percentage of at risk students. Additional best practices are clearly needed and should be sought and added to capture more of the at risk population, but those best practices do not exist in the first school.
But school grades prevent say otherwise. They claim, falsely, that the first school is the model for graduating any and all students while whatever the second is doing should be ignored and probably changed. It certainly isn’t a model for anything or anyone. Think about how wrong that is. In fact, the only lesson the first school can give the second regarding graduation rates is to hope that over the years its demographics shift to a wealthier population.
Number two, we don’t have the truth about either school. The public deserves to know where a school is effective and where it is not yet as effective as it needs to be. That is the only way the public can know that their tax dollars are being spent appropriately. Only here we don’t have that truth. Grades in this scenario only communicate falsehoods, one being that the first school is great at something when that is not the truth, and that the other school is terrible at it, which is also not the truth. The consequences for that are enormous: it justifies funding for the “good” schools and stigmatization and consequences for the “bad” ones. It creates the appearance that investing in “bad” schools is just throwing good money after bad. It enables lots of negative judgments about who is teaching in those schools without any sense of the facts.
And number three, school grades help preserve a general societal bias that schools in poor communities are terrible schools and schools in wealthy communities are great schools. School grades ignore that effectiveness in schools will differ according to who each school serves. That isn’t an excuse for lower expectations, but rather, it accepts as fact that the truth about where a school is or is not effective today is the means to identifying a next step. Without that, improvement is impossible. There can be no doubt that differences in resources, parental attitudes towards education, attention to academic efforts outside and prior to starting school, etc., can greatly impact the effectiveness a school can have, which is all the more reason to have an accurate picture. The greater the need for a continuous improvement environment, the greater the need for the truth.
Which brings me back to the snake oil of school grades being good for no one. The very best way to ensure that the schools serving our most at risk populations never get the chance to tell the truth about where they are effective and where they are not yet as effective as they need to be so that they can put themselves on a continuous improvement track is to simply label them as chronic failures. That way we won’t have to listen to their truths, which can be inconvenient and difficult to hear, especially when the solutions are truly challenging. We can relabel marginalization as poor performance, which justifies underfunding, stigmatizing, or even ignoring the schools and writing off those in them. And for those who harbor racist attitudes or thoughts of any kind, it helps justify and solidify those attitudes, which is toxic to our democracy.
The snake oil is that school grades tell the truth, motivate appropriate actions on the part of the school, and make the world a better place. School grades do none of that, but instead, hurt the very patients the quacks promised would be helped by it.
If I’m having a cynical day, it’s easy to think that those promoting these kinds of ridiculous systems know all this and don’t care. On my optimistic days I like to think there were lots of well-intentioned people who made a terrible mistake and would correct it if they just understood.
Regardless, the ridiculousness of preconditioning our attitudes towards public education through an approach designed to falsely skew those attitudes towards the negative cannot be overstated. Nor can the harm it causes the children in this country who are its future.
That’s why you should ignore whatever grade the state gave you and focus on the underlying truths. Anything else and we give up on making education better for all our children.
So, I’ll say it again here the way I wish I would’ve said it then: schools are perhaps the most critical of our public institutions and require a significant investment to run, and yet we choose to see them through a lens that doesn’t tell us the truth, and what it says is almost always guaranteed to be bad news. And we do that all for the cool price tag of several billion dollars a year on top of what we already spend on schools. And in Texas and 16 other states, school grades are loaded on top of that nonsense and then sold to the public as representing the truth about their schools.
It’s hard to invent a similar scenario given the level of its ridiculousness. You’d have to invent a group of people willing to take one of the biggest expenditures of taxpayer dollars on a mission-critical component of the country that the public is therefore desperate to understand and then imagine they choose to spend an additional billion or so on an accountability system that can’t help anybody understand anything but that is all but guaranteed to help the world question their investment by constantly putting it in a negative light. (A mouthful--sorry.)
The inventors of such a scenario should be summarily fired and prevented from ever expressing an opinion on the matter again. Instead, in public education those very inventors continue to double down on their approach and insist the problem is the educators themselves.
I’ve written at length (se below) about what the research instrument called a standardized test is designed to do and what it is not designed to do so I’ll encourage you to see my comments there. Suffice it say that using it to judge school quality would be like trying to pound a square peg into a round hole with a goldfish. Literally.
What I would also encourage you to do is ignore whatever grade (or label, or number of stars, or whatever) your state assigns to you. Whatever the grade, it says nothing about your effectiveness. Nada. Zilch. Zero. Zip. It won’t feel that way, I get it, but it’s the truth. Put the plaques in the trash. Tell the reporters that isn’t who you are. Don’t say anything on social media--especially if the state said nice things--you'll see why in a minute.
I can show you why you should do that using graduation rates since they are a little easier to see than test scores, but the principle is the same.
It’s reasonable to think of the graduation rate for a school as consisting of two broad categories of students: those who would graduate regardless of the high school they attend, and those who are at risk of dropping out. Now imagine two high schools. In the first nearly 100% of the students graduate year in and year out and would graduate regardless of the high school they attended, but they just happen to all live in the same middle to upper class neighborhood. In that case the graduation rate happens despite the school, not because of it. It may be an effective school in other ways, or it may not, but you’d have to look at those areas to make that determination. What the school cannot be said to do is contribute much in the way of the graduation rate, which is not a criticism of the school or its efforts, but a statement about the school’s locale.
Now imagine a second school with an 85% graduation rate in which half of the graduating seniors were at serious risk of not graduating as were, of course, all of those who did not graduate. The facts there would be clear: that school should be seen as being reasonably effective at moving at risk students towards the goal of graduation, and the school should continue with those efforts. But the fact remains that 15% of the students are still missing the opportunity to graduate and the school will need to find additional tools and methodologies to recover as many of those students as possible going forward.
But what would be totally inappropriate would be to declare the school a failure at graduating students. That would put the efforts that are working at risk of being dismissed as part of the purported failure and make the school less effective than it was before, harming the students. It would fail to do give the appropriate credit where credit is due and to communicate clearly where efforts will be needed going forward. It would make it harder to graduate students going forward, not easier.
Here’s something else to consider: the second school has very little if anything to learn from the first. The difference in the number of at risk students between the schools is due to demographic differences, and the help the second school needs is not an area the first school addresses much if ever.
What that also means is that should the first school experience a shift in demographics and now need to understand how best to serve at risk students, the second school will offer some opportunities for best practice. Of course, conditioned as we are to think that the higher the graduation rate the better the school at graduating students (or the higher the test scores the better the school, etc.), that is exactly the opposite of what most people would think. But the truth is the truth, and that without those underlying truths improvement will become impossible.
If we make the crude, naïve, and stupid mistake of drawing a line in the sand at say 90% and insist that schools above that line are effective at graduating students and schools below are ineffective, think of the harm that does to the schools and to the overall system, not to mention the students. The first school would receive a passing grade for its efforts and be considered as a model at graduating students when that is simply not the case. The second school would receive a failing grade for its efforts and be told that it is being terribly ineffective at achieving educational goals for its students. It certainly would not be considered a model for anything, and any attempt by the administrators in the school to accurately and truthfully declare where they were and we’re not effective would look to the world like excuses for poor performance. Any attempts not to change what they believed to be working would be met with suspicion. In the end, the students would be the ones who suffered.
Think of what just happened because of that compliance line of 90% (or what would happen with any similar compliance line, e.g., percentage of students passing a test, or having higher test scores, etc.).
Number one, we just lost the opportunity to identify best practice. That is an incredibly dangerous thing to have happen in any profession or organization, because it makes improvement almost impossible. Best practice existed at the second school in some of what it was doing to graduate a significant percentage of at risk students. Additional best practices are clearly needed and should be sought and added to capture more of the at risk population, but those best practices do not exist in the first school.
But school grades prevent say otherwise. They claim, falsely, that the first school is the model for graduating any and all students while whatever the second is doing should be ignored and probably changed. It certainly isn’t a model for anything or anyone. Think about how wrong that is. In fact, the only lesson the first school can give the second regarding graduation rates is to hope that over the years its demographics shift to a wealthier population.
Number two, we don’t have the truth about either school. The public deserves to know where a school is effective and where it is not yet as effective as it needs to be. That is the only way the public can know that their tax dollars are being spent appropriately. Only here we don’t have that truth. Grades in this scenario only communicate falsehoods, one being that the first school is great at something when that is not the truth, and that the other school is terrible at it, which is also not the truth. The consequences for that are enormous: it justifies funding for the “good” schools and stigmatization and consequences for the “bad” ones. It creates the appearance that investing in “bad” schools is just throwing good money after bad. It enables lots of negative judgments about who is teaching in those schools without any sense of the facts.
And number three, school grades help preserve a general societal bias that schools in poor communities are terrible schools and schools in wealthy communities are great schools. School grades ignore that effectiveness in schools will differ according to who each school serves. That isn’t an excuse for lower expectations, but rather, it accepts as fact that the truth about where a school is or is not effective today is the means to identifying a next step. Without that, improvement is impossible. There can be no doubt that differences in resources, parental attitudes towards education, attention to academic efforts outside and prior to starting school, etc., can greatly impact the effectiveness a school can have, which is all the more reason to have an accurate picture. The greater the need for a continuous improvement environment, the greater the need for the truth.
Which brings me back to the snake oil of school grades being good for no one. The very best way to ensure that the schools serving our most at risk populations never get the chance to tell the truth about where they are effective and where they are not yet as effective as they need to be so that they can put themselves on a continuous improvement track is to simply label them as chronic failures. That way we won’t have to listen to their truths, which can be inconvenient and difficult to hear, especially when the solutions are truly challenging. We can relabel marginalization as poor performance, which justifies underfunding, stigmatizing, or even ignoring the schools and writing off those in them. And for those who harbor racist attitudes or thoughts of any kind, it helps justify and solidify those attitudes, which is toxic to our democracy.
The snake oil is that school grades tell the truth, motivate appropriate actions on the part of the school, and make the world a better place. School grades do none of that, but instead, hurt the very patients the quacks promised would be helped by it.
If I’m having a cynical day, it’s easy to think that those promoting these kinds of ridiculous systems know all this and don’t care. On my optimistic days I like to think there were lots of well-intentioned people who made a terrible mistake and would correct it if they just understood.
Regardless, the ridiculousness of preconditioning our attitudes towards public education through an approach designed to falsely skew those attitudes towards the negative cannot be overstated. Nor can the harm it causes the children in this country who are its future.
That’s why you should ignore whatever grade the state gave you and focus on the underlying truths. Anything else and we give up on making education better for all our children.
Comments
Post a Comment