Notes from the Field
Submitted by Frank Murphy, December 16, 2010
Governor-elect Tom Corbett has stated that he is interested in producing a new report card for Pennsylvania’s schools. Currently each school in the state does receive a state-developed performance report that is primarily based on how well its students perform on the Pennsylvania System of School Assessment (PSSA). Mr. Corbett is interested in creating a simple and easy to understand accountability document that uses a letter grading system from A to F, similar to that which is used in most student report cards. His intention is to make this tool available to parents so that they can easily evaluate the performance of their child’s school.
More importantly, he stated that he wants to establish a rationale for redistributing public funds for the use of private or parochial schools. This would be done by giving vouchers to students who attend public schools that have received an “F’ as a grade.
Currently, parents of students who attend a public school in Pennsylvania can find online a report card for their children’s school as well as a listing of their school’s Adequate Yearly Progress status. A complete list of the results of all schools in the Philadelphia School District can be found here. The state of Pennsylvania has been providing this information to the public for several years.
So does the governor proposes to discard this system in favor a new and yet undermined one? Or will the present system be maintained and a parallel process be developed and also be implemented? Either way his proposal raises several important questions.
In the current economic environment where public funds are likely to decrease, how can the governor-elect rationalize the use of declining state education resources in order to pay for the creation of a new and potentially expensive school assessment system when a suitable system already exist?
Will every public, private and parochial school in the state that receives public funds as part of a school choice option receive a letter grade as a participant in this proposed assessment system?
What criteria will be used to determine the grade for individual schools?
Will indicators other than student attendance, academic performance, and teacher qualifications be considered?
If so what will those indicators be?
The Philadelphia School District has already developed its own expensive and misleading school report card. I have discussed this less-than-fair or transparent process in this recent post. Additionally Philadelphia has created yet another school assessment system, the School Performance Index. It is used to rank district schools on a score continuum of 1 to 10. The information that is used to determine these rankings comes almost exclusively from one year’s worth of standardized test results. Little consideration is give to any other factors in judging a school’s success in the computation of this index.
Hopefully Mr. Corbett does not have in mind school assessment tools similar to the ones being used in Philadelphia. If this is the case, then school districts across the state, whether affluent or under-resourced, will find that some of their schools will receive a failing grade.
Mr. Corbett’s school evaluation proposal on its face sounds like it will be just one more attempt to characterize public schools as failures in order to justify redirecting public dollars to the coffers of private, non profit or for-profit organizations.
This is the time to question the wisdom of this idea. Informed public discussion and debate on this issue now will save us from the frustration of asking later, “Why close the barn door after the horse is gone?”