Monday, November 05, 2007

Report Cards

I think its interesting that school administrators in a recent New York Times article are complaining that grades do not do justice to what schools are doing. These school report cards will not reflect any whole school. Teacher grades for students are due this week. Do our grades reflect our whole student? Quantifying quality is not easy.

“It is just so demoralizing to have a number or grade assigned that is just sort of trivializing things,” Ms. Foote said. “It doesn’t reflect, I think, the valuable work and the very complicated work that we do here.”

Throughout the city, principals are bracing for the release this week of report cards from the Education Department that will, for the first time, grade schools on a scale of A through F. Because the report cards will assess schools on how much individual students improve year to year, as well as on a complicated mixture of test scores and other factors, many of the grades are likely to upend longstanding reputations, casting celebrated schools as failures and lauding those that work miracles with struggling students. Some principals refer to the scores as a “scarlet letter.”

READ MORE


Look up a school's grade HERE



No comments: