Grade inflation and lower standards at the DOE: what else is new?

Today, there were lots of articles about the inflated high school grades (the so-called “progress reports”) which turned out to be almost as inflated as those for elementary and middle schools. 75 percent of NYC high schools got As or Bs, and only one school got an F.

Yet as I pointed out to WNYC radio, more than half of our high schools are extremely overcrowded, with the largest class sizes in the state, and among the lowest graduation rates anywhere. According to the Daily News, at more than half of the schools that received the highest scores, less than half of the kids graduate with a Regents diploma.

Moreover, there seems to be a double standard and favoritism at Tweed. DOE says they will close down large high schools that did not do well, but the one high school that got an “F”, Peace and Diversity, will be provided with more help and resources. Is that because it happens to be a small school, founded in 2004? And the DOE has a vested interest in promoting the new small schools they helped start over our large high schools, those schools that in fact, their own policies have helped destabilize?

See the response in the Post by the Michael Mulgrew, UFT head: “Mulgrew also bristled at a chart produced by the city showing that the smaller high schools opened under Bloomberg since 2002 were faring better than others, even as several of the newer schools rated D's and the lone F.

"I don't like when you try to draw distinctions when you're responsible for all of the schools but you have a vested interest in trying to tell people that the schools you created are doing well," he said.”

Unfortunately, none of the articles make the connections between these grades, the threat of school closure, and all the cheating and grade tampering scandals that have erupted in high schools in recent years. And none make the point that the cut scores are arbitrarily decided upon by the administration – so in essence, the Chancellor and his minions decide ahead of time exactly how many grades there will be in each category, easily providing the DOE with yet another way to congratulate themselves while closing down certain schools to grab their real estate.

Most interesting is the following finding, from the NY Times: “The school environment grades, which are based on attendance and results of student, parent and teacher surveys, and make up 15 percent of the grade, showed the steepest decline. This year, 55 high schools received a D or an F in school environment, compared with 12 last year.”

What’s going on here? Are the pressures of the high stakes accountability system tearing our high schools apart? If so, it wouldn’t be altogether surprising.

The absurd, silly, ridiculous school grades

See articles on this year’s elementary and middle school grades, or “progress reports”: Times, NY Post, Daily News, NY1, and this piece in Gotham schools (the best).

They are replete with examples of the absurd results, with schools such as PS 82 in the Bronx jumping from an “A” to an “F” and back this year to an “A”. PS 8 in Brooklyn which got an “F” last year and this year got an “A”, with the principal saying they did nothing different. The three schools that Klein tried to close last year to put charter schools in their place-- P.S. 194, 241 and 150 – all got “As”.

In fact, 84% of the schools got an “A” this year, and only two schools out of more than one thousand got “F”s. This is grade inflation that would put any human being other than Joel Klein to hide his head in shame.

And yet, according to the NY Times, “he clearly took pride in the results. “If you’re asking whether I would rather see less A’s,” he said, “the answer is no.”

Meanwhile, 87% of principals said in a recent survey that their schools were unable to provide a quality education because of excessive class sizes.

The absurdity of the grades this year derive from two profound flaws: First, 85% of the grade is based on one year’s gains or losses in test scores, which experts have found to be statistically unreliable and extremely erratic.

And two, the state tests have become so much easier and their scoring so lax that students can pass them without reading the questions – as long as they manage to fill in a few bubbles along the way. (For more on this scandal, well-reported everywhere except the Times, see the Daily News here and here, Gotham Schools and this NY Post column by Diane Ravitch.)

I wrote an oped for the Daily news about the new grading system when it was first announced in the fall of 2007: “Why parents & teachers should reject new school grades.” It starts out this way: “The new school grading system unveiled this week by Chancellor Joel Klein is a fiasco.”

But what do you expect when you had two guys in charge, Liebman and Klein, who are ignorant as to statistics, the unreliability of test scores, and even the larger goals of education?

Perhaps the best result is where we have now arrived: hopefully everyone realizes that the emperor has no clothes and they should ignore these silly grades, as they should have in the first place.

The absurd NYC school grade system

There is now abundant evidence to show that the grades that DOE awards schools – their so-called “progress reports” -- are meaningless and rely on chance, like throwing dice, because they rely predominantly on whether a school’s test scores last year were above or below the year before.

Sixty percent of the grade depends on so-called “progress”, which means annual gains or losses in test scores, 25% on the test scores themselves, and only 15% on survey results. As a result, this year, many schools went from failing grades to grades of A , and just as occurred last year, some highly regarded schools received “Fs”.

Last year, in a Daily News oped entitled “Why parents & teachers should reject the new school grades”, I pointed out that research shows that 30-80% of the annual gains or losses in test scores are random – and sure enough, this is what the grades turned out to be. Last week, Daniel Koretz, professor at Harvard and national expert on testing, wrote:

”My advice to New Yorkers is to … ignore the letter grades and to push for improvements to the evaluation system…It does not make sense for parents to choose schools, or for policymakers to praise or berate schools, for a rating that is so strongly influenced by error.”

And yet according to the DOE, eighteen schools that received a D or an F last year have new principals this year – showing how lousy decisions are being based upon these inherently unreliable measures.

As Ellen Foote points out, the principal at IS 89, a school that received a “D” last year despite being selected as the only NYC middle school to receive an award for its achievements from the federal government:

“Last year’s grades often reversed the state’s opinion of schools… She knew of one District 2 middle school that got a B last year but was on the state’s list of schools that need improvement. Under No Child Left Behind, many students in that school transferred to I.S. 89, a Blue Ribbon school. That meant the students transferred from a B school to a D school. This year, both schools received an A.

Indeed, as Eduwonkette has written, the proportion of NYC schools receiving an “F” that are in good standing according to federal or state government standards is larger than the proportion of schools receiving an “A”.

“How do you reconcile those discrepancies?” Foote said. “How do parents make sense of that? It just is all over the place — it’s such a disservice to schools and to parents…. It’s so simplistic at best and confusing and probably invalid at the worst, at a very high cost in terms of money, resources and morale.”

The smaller the school or number of students tested, the more likely annual gains or losses are invalid; and as this post in Gotham Schools reveals, the smaller the school, the more likely it received an extremely high or low grade this year.

In response to this sort of criticism, Jim Liebman, the head of the DOE accountability office, said last spring that this year’s progress score would be based on two years of data instead of one year– which would have improved its reliability, yet for some reason, he went back on his word.

Why? To my knowledge, the DOE has never explained.

Rather than making things better, Liebman made the grade even more unreliable by increasing the importance of the “progress” score to account for 60% of a school's grade, an even larger percentage -- up from 55% last year. Why? Again, this has not been explained.

Was this to take advantage of last year’s anomalously high increases in scores? Were Klein and Liebman themselves gaming the system to ensure that 80% of schools would receive “A”s or “B”s --so that they could claim great credit for their so-called but illusory improvements? Who’s to know?

The idea that 80% of NYC schools could be rated “A” or “B” is in itself absurd, given the fact that our school system has among the highest class sizes in the nation and among the lowest graduation rates. This is grade inflation of the highest order, apparently crafted so the administration can pat itself on the back.

I wish those reporters who uncritically reported on the $20 million teacher bonus program on Friday – which also rely on improving a school’s score in the unreliable progress category – would now dig a little deeper, to examine how these cash rewards were likely awarded randomly as well.