A question for everyone to think about:What is the purpose of giving a letter grade to schools?
In what way is this better than the previous report cards that included test scores, attendance, proportion of teachers who are certified, and a variety of other factors?
Isn't this akin to giving each child a single letter grade that lumps together his performance in every single area of his or her life at school? Would we really want to tell kids "you are a D student because your test scores are not as high this year as last year"? Doesn't it
make more sense to mark them in relation to their performance on a variety of tasks?
The whole scheme is simplistic and misleading. It humiliates people who are doing a good, even a great job, of educating children. It attempts to replace nuanced human judgment with a computer's calculations. The effort to remove human judgment is yet another sign of the degradation of education--a supremely human and judgmental activity--under the current DOE.
Diane Ravitch
For more reasons to distrust the new grading system, see an earlier posting here.
