Did you see this headline: NY Post Comes Out Against School Grades: These grades flunk
Unambigously bright light? They must suffer from severe pupil dilation.It is becoming increasingly clear that Schools Chancellor Joel Klein is doing no one any favors -- not the public, and certainly not himself -- by assigning letter-grade report cards to city schools. The jerry-rigged system for determining the grades obscures more than it reveals. Thus, the information the cards impart is worse than misleading -- it's virtually useless. And the charter-school movement -- an unambiguously bright light in the city school system -- is particularly ill-served by the letter grades.
Poor babies. They're favorite pet charters didn't do so well on the grading system. It must be flawed. But then again we knew that all along. Of course Michael MulGarten stepped into it with this one:
Leonie Haimson commented:
Even the NY Post, owned by Murdoch and close buddy of Bloomberg and Klein admits that the school grades are so absurdly unreliable they should be eliminated.
The straw that broke the camel’s back for them this year appears to be the way charter schools got lower scores on average this year.
The jerry-rigged system for determining the grades obscures more than it reveals. Thus, the information the cards impart is worse than misleading -- it's virtually useless.
Followed by Steve Koss
It's difficult not to guffaw over the absurdist inconsistency in the Post's "new position" on school report cards, what with their having gone from its greatest shills to sudden detractors simply because they disagree with its outcome in respect to the system's assessment of charter schools.
What's even more astonishing is that they either don't see or don't care to see the other astonishing inconsistency in their revised position on the school report cards. If after having spent countless millions of dollars and doubtless reflecting the professional genius of innumerable experts on education, the end result is so inconsistent and unreliable that even the Post's troglodytic conservatives want to throw out this type of reporting at the aggregated school level, what could possibly make any sentient homo sapiens think that INCREASING the granularity of these measurements to the teacher/classroom level will be any better?
Likely without the faintest sense of what they've done, the editors at the Post have kneecapped their own already-indefensible position with regard to value-added analysis and evaluation of teacher performance. After all, if the geniuses at DOE and their wasted millions couldn't do it right for entire schools (where aggregation enables at least some degree of the margin for error to wash itself out), how on earth can it be done for a third-grade teacher with just 25 or 30 children in a classroom?
What could be more better than seeing the Post's editorial troglodytes unknowingly clubbing themselves in the knees without even realizing they're doing it?
Steve Koss
