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: BoardBuzz: NSBA's Daily Weblog

It ain't easy grading schools

Yesterday EdWeek released their annual Quality Counts special edition. Each year EdWeek grades states in six categories and gave U.S. schools as a whole a middle of the road C. New York, Massachusetts, and Maryland earned the highest grades with a B while five states received a D+. Although West Virginia received an F in the K?12 Achievement category it still received a B-, ranking 6th among all the states. This is likely due to the A's they achieved in the standards, assessments and accountability, and school finance categories. How can this be? How can a state's overall grade by so high when they received an F in K?12 Achievement? Once again, these results show how difficult it is to assign one grade to schools, not only at the state level but even when evaluating individual schools. There is no one score or grade that can possibly identify all the areas where schools excel and the areas they need to work on. That's why it is important to look at the whole school, not just an overall grade or ranking. BoardBuzz knows that educating children is much more complicated than that. That is why our friends at the Center for Public Education have been working on a great new resource to help school board members, educators, parents, policymakers, and the media look beyond simple test scores so they can get a more complete picture of their local schools. The Center isn't going to attempt to grade schools like EdWeek but it will inform readers of which measures they should look at to get a better picture of their own school's success. These measures go beyond student achievement to include student attainment, school climate, staffing, and funding among others. For all those interested in public schools, look for this important resource in the coming weeks at www.centerforpubliceducation.org. For a complete a summary of the Quality Counts report check out the Center for Public Education. BoardBuzz also recommends you take a look at the Center's Round-up of National Report Cards to find out how other report cards graded your state and why the grade isn't likely to be consistent across all report cards.

Full post as published by BoardBuzz: NSBA's Daily Weblog on January 10, 2008 (boomark / email).