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making the grade
January 29, 2010
City schools to be graded on a curve for next year’s report cards
Many of the city elementary and middle schools who received A’s on last year’s report cards are likely to see their grades drop under a new scoring system for next year, Department of Education officials told principals today.
Next year, only the top-scoring 25 percent of elementary and middle schools will receive A’s, with just under a third of schools each getting B’s and C’s. A tenth of schools will be handed D’s, and 5 percent will receive failing grades, according to the plan outlined today by the city’s accountability chief Shael Polakow-Suransky.
(More than 80 percent of elementary and middle schools took home A’s on their progress reports for last school year.)
The change comes as part of the first step of a gradual recalibration of the way schools are rated in the city’s progress reports system and is also a by-product of the wider state effort to overhaul tests given to New York’s third through eighth graders.
State education officials are redesigning tests this year, both to make them more difficult and to judge a wider set of skills. Students are also taking state test in May this year for the first time, where in the past they’ve sat for exams in January.
Suransky said the curved grading system was to account for the uncertainty of how the variety of changes in the state exams are going to affect schools’ performances. The city wants to let principals know how their schools will be graded at the start of each year, but given the haze that still lies over the coming tests, Suransky said it wouldn’t be fair to schools to guess what bars for success should be set.
“We could well end up in a situation where most of the schools could be D’s and F’s” if the city guessed wrong, Suransky said in an interview. “And that wouldn’t be an accurate depiction of how schools are doing.”
Suransky said that the curved grading system was likely to be temporary until the DOE can accurately gauge what scores the most successful schools should receive. Because state exams for high school students are not changing this year, high schools will continue to be graded as they have in the past.
Some school principals said that despite the effort to account for the x-factor of the new state tests, there is still plenty of uncertainty in the new system.
“My concern is that an A means a school is outstanding, and can we all be outstanding?” asked Janet Heller, principal of M.S. 324, the Patricia Mirabal School. “What does outstanding mean?”
“Will a school that is outstanding not be given an A because the quota of 25% was met?” Heller continued. “Are they saying that any school that has a 90 to 100 grade is outstanding, or are they saying that we will only allow 25% of our schools to be called outstanding?”
Another principal, Stacey Gauthier of Renaissance Charter School, said that the ambiguity leaves principals unsure of how to prepare for their year.
“If [the report card system] keeps changing and the criteria isn’t clear, it’s a little bit unfair to the schools,” she said. “It’s like saying to a kid, I don’t really now what kind of test I’m going to give you, but when things come out I’ll figure it out. That’s not really the best assessment.”
Gauthier said that because city report card grades have concrete repercussions for schools, knowing in advance how a school will be evaluated matters. “Schools are closed based on this information, schools go on remediation, schools lose funding, parents look at this — it is high stakes,” she said.
The change in grade distribution was one of several changes to the report card grading system announced today, some of which are likely to be welcomed by schools and advocates.
For example, the report cards will now grade student progress in a way that controls for students’ scores the year before and compares each students’ progress with other students who started at the same place.
In previous years’ reports, students were grouped by whether or not they scored above or below state tests’ proficiency bar, and each student was compared against others in their group. “That was a blunter version [of comparisons], and this is going to get more granular,” Suransky said.
Another change will alter the way schools are judged for their work with disabled students. The reports will set specific goals students must reach to boost special education students’ academic achievement, and will consider gains made by students differently according to level of need.
“We want to make it really clear that if you do well with these students, you will be rewarded,” Suransky said.
But the element of the report card program that has drawn perhaps the most criticism since its introduction in 2007 — that grades are weighted too heavily on the results of standardized tests — remains unchanged.
The plan released today isn’t yet final. Suransky’s accountability office will be meeting with groups of principals and parents for feedback, and will announce the final changes to the progress report system in March, he said.
Along with the changes to report card grading, Suransky’s accountability office also released a clarification of new state guidelines for granting high-school students course credit. Among the changes will be a new way to monitor how schools are granting credit recovery, which gives students credit for classes they have failed. The DOE has not previously tracked credit recovery programs or the numbers of course credits gained in them. The city will also begin randomly auditing the scoring of Regents exams at 10 percent of the city’s high schools, Sursansky said.
Here’s the letter that Suransky sent to principals today, along with memos detailing the changes to the report cards and credit accumulation:
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January 29th, 2010 10:27 pm
Let me see if I understand this correctly–if the school grades make the school look bad, you close the school.
And if the school grades make Tweed look bad, you change the grades.
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January 30th, 2010 7:17 am
How much money do these clowns continue to waste on this nonsense? And of course it makes a kid feel real good in the eyes of his or her friends when he attends a school given a grade of D while his or friends attend a school graded A. But then again, an educator mightr underrstand that. The incompetent, uncertified, arrogant lawyer masquerading as an educator who never spent a day in a school in his life just doesn’t understand that. Another reason this phony is occupying a position for which he is legally unqualified. The sooner he goes, the sooner the schools can begin to make progress.
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January 30th, 2010 7:18 am
seriously? a curve? so…next year when they look at report cards and make closure announcements based on schools getting a C or a D…there A> will be a guaranteed supply of low-graded schools (who may have quite lovely actual numerical scores) and B> there will be a guaranteed supply of schools with declining letter grades (because they created a system that ensures grades will drop. And, of course, they won’t see that it is completely invalid to compare letter grades that from year to year are based on different numerical scores and/or grading systems.
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January 30th, 2010 7:24 am
“We’ll make sure our grades are lower. This, we wholeheartedly pledge to the children and their parents of New York City.”
Joel Klein
Mike Bloomberg -
January 30th, 2010 7:29 am
Interesting that this change comes AFTER Bloomberg has been reelected…
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January 30th, 2010 9:10 am
BTW buried in this memo is a statement they will begin auditing Regents grading in 10% of the schools. Who will do the auditing? Isn’t this the role of the state?
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January 30th, 2010 9:12 am
Too funny for words.
Howzabout we demand that DOE recalculate and RESTATE the grades for the three prior rounds based on their proposed NEW method so at least what’s about to be four letter grades can be roughly COMPARE - able?
And while they’re at it:
a) Fix the bug wherein schools frequently get a number less than zero or greater than 100 on what is nominally a min-max, 0-100, spectrum. The defense of that bug has been weak.
b) REDUCE the category weight on “progress” relative to “performance” in light of the well-documented INFLATION in the underlying State Test Scores. The rise in scores has long been falsely attributed to the schools, but worse, claimed by Kleinberg for their policies. This is one of the mechanisms of that hype.
c) REDUCE the weight on “peer groups” relative to “city-wide” , and
d) Fercryin out loud, take the G&T schools OUT of the peer group mixes. Duh.
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January 30th, 2010 11:11 am
This is just another move of the DOE to continuously shuffle and keep staff at public schools on the edge. This past year’s assertion that 90%+ of the primary and Middle Schools are of A or B caliber is ridiculous looking at the number of HS that are not A/Bs.
Grades for the DOE are as elastic as their future hidden plans for these school buildings they have at their control.
Moreover, the idea that 10% of the regents will get audited, it is a simple diversion tactic out of the reality of what is happening in HS in NYC.
Depending of which school gets audited by whom(most likely the same experienced “edicators” of the DOE), the News media will be presented with “bloody evidence” that “cheating” has been ongoing at a certain school(which the just and impartial DOE has been checking out to shutter) while inconsistencies at other more “in” schools with the interests of the DOE, will check a “free pass” to jail and avoid the great lynching and feeding in secondary schools, in NYC.
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January 30th, 2010 1:25 pm
I would like all you bloggers to know that my intentions to have 10% of the school’s auidted for summer school regents is to purely take out the remainding large schools. Oh yes, the only schools that will be audited are schools that I need closed. This will allow me to bring in more charter schools. One other thing I neglected to mention to the public, the closing of these current schools will also help me flood students into the nearby large schools so that they will be the next schools to close down. If you don’t think that is genious try looking at the new scorring metrics that I put into place: this year to earn a D on the high school progress report school’s will have to score a 44, last year a school needed a 44 to earn a D; this year to earn a C on the high school progress report schools will have to score a 51, last year to earn a B you had to score a 54. I will stop here, by now you should realize that next year I will take out all those schools that will earn a C for the third year in a row.
Klein
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January 30th, 2010 2:01 pm
JK…that was one of the weirdest post ever…definitely a score in the 10th percentile…and ya oughta try spell check when you want to write lectures and deliver them to an audience you obviously don’t like.
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January 30th, 2010 2:31 pm
When the progress report was first created and implemented, we should have questioned its motive! The DoE’s Accountability and Assessments policies and reports are very unstable, unrealiable, and unfair. Their rush to close as many schools as possible is driving the changing of their methods of evaluating schools. They cannot be trusted. These changes are never for the best interest of the communities, but for their own best interest.
In late November 2009, the progress reports, coupled with the quality reviews, 20 schools were identified for phase out. I assume that in November 2010, with the shifting of the cut scores on the updated progress report, another 20, or maybe more, schools will be on the chopping block!
We are definitely heading towards a seismic disruption in our communities.
Charter schools movement is metastasizing at an alarming rate where public schools will be consumed by their growth.
We’ve learned that the Chancellor and the mayor will stop at nothing. They will not listen to the parents, the community organizations nor the politicians who are on the side of all the stakeholders. To put a stop to the closing of public schools, the communities at large will need to devise a plan that will bring Bloomberg to his knees and will remove Klein forever. The community-based organizations, the parents, the UFT, and the politicians will need to come up with that plan because the survival of the public schools are depending on them.
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January 30th, 2010 3:57 pm
Where is the next Jane Jacobs…..she stopped Moses, now we need to stop…..them
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January 30th, 2010 4:23 pm
Grading schools on a curve is one thing, but the introduction of the “growth percentile model” is a really big deal. This eliminates the problem with comparing scores from year to year on assessments that are not calibrated across grade levels. Basically, you look at a student’s score this year and compare it to the scores of all of the students who scored the same on last year’s test. This gives you percentile ranks for each student, which you can average across a school. This lets you look at how a school does with each student, regardless of where each student started. The problem with this method is that it just compares students’ performance to each other, and doesn’t evaluate against any fixed standard. For example, you might have a student one year who got a 500 scale score (far from proficient) and the following year scored in the 95th percentile of all students who had 500 the previous year. This sounds great, until you realize that the student’s current scale score is only 530 and still not proficient. It will be really interesting to see how they define success using this system.
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January 31st, 2010 2:11 pm
This article like others on this issue ignores two big problems that remain with the grading system.
Though DOE says that they “wanted to avoid huge year-to-year grade fluctuations at schools”, it appears that the system will still be based primarily on comparisons in one year’s increases or decreases in student test scores, which researchers say is 30-80% random.When he first introduced the system, Liebman said that the school grades would eventually take three years of test scores into account, which would be more statistically reliable, but then went back on his word – as he did on so much else.
2. Liebman also originally said that a set percentage of schools would receive different grades, an idea they quickly discarded in the rush to show “progress” through the inflated state test scores. They have now gone back to this concept because of the ridicule they received when last year 84% of elementary schools got As or Bs.
Yet by grading on a “curve,” this will mean that 15% of schools will get Ds or Fs; which will allow DOE to close up to 15% of all schools each year, according to their so-called “accountability” system.
The whole system is junk, of course, and should be discarded. -
January 31st, 2010 10:39 pm
May I make a radical suggestion? Stop making changes you haven’t thought through to the end! How can we know the integrity of the grades you give? when our kids are failing?
By the way, will the kid’s test scores also be curved? I think perhaps this is an attempt to help the failing charter schools that Klein so vigorously supports without good cause. On a whole I am willing to bet the ratio of successful academics at charters are no different than the ratio at successful public schools. Klein in case you didn’t know NY spoke out against you vehemently when we thought you were being considered for Education Secretary. Please stop making decisions in the education system based on the dream you had the night before. The decisions you make affect people and have long standing consequences - be careful, be mindful, be considerate, reasonable and for God’s sake be SMART! -
February 1st, 2010 9:49 am
Why do we allow the DOE to tell us that we must judge their performance based on a measure that they create? Especially, when they constantly change the measure to produce the results that justify what they do. For example, if they’ve really made progress in student achievement, why should it matter if the state makes the test “harder?” I dont’ remember Klein or Bloomberg telling us that they made progress because the tests were easy!
I know it’s easy, but i can’t help it—is this 1984?
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