Everything You've Heard About Failing Schools Is Wrong

[Starry Messenger]

http://www.motherjones.com/media/2012/08/mission-high-false-low-performing-school

<snip>

And then everything changed. At Mission High, the struggling school she'd chosen against the advice of her friends and relatives, Maria earned high grades in math and some days caught herself speaking English even with her Spanish-speaking teachers. By 11th grade, she wrote long papers on complex topics like desegregation and the war in Iraq. She became addicted to winning debates in class, despite her shyness and heavy accent. In her junior year, she became the go-to translator and advocate for her mother, her aunts, and for other Latino kids at school. In March, Maria and her teachers were celebrating acceptance letters to five colleges and two prestigious scholarships, including one from Dave Eggers' writing center, 826 Valencia.

But on the big state tests—the days-long multiple-choice exams that students in California take once a year—Maria scored poorly. And these standardized tests, she understood, were how her school was graded. According to the scores, Mission High is among the lowest-performing 5 percent of schools in the country, and it has consistently failed to meet the ever-rising benchmarks set by the federal No Child Left Behind Act. The law mandates universal "proficiency" in math and reading by 2014—a deadline that weighs heavily on educators around the nation, since schools that don't meet it face stiff penalties.


IT WAS WITH THESE PENALTIES on his mind that Mission High principal Eric Guthertz got ready for work one morning in 2010. It was his wife's birthday, and also the day California was supposed to release its list of "persistently low-performing" schools—schools that the state deemed as urgently in need of improvement. As he put on his tie, he recalls, "I told my wife, 'I hope we dodged that bullet!' But I was kidding, because I was convinced we wouldn't be on that list. And on my ride to school, I was feeling bad for the principals" who would.

It wasn't long after he got to the office that the phone rang. It was the district. Mission was on the list.

<snip>

[knitter4democracy]

1. Spot-on analysis and observations.

When so much of our data says we're doing the best we ever have in educating everyone, telling us that we're still failing is obviously all about moving public money to private hands.

[LWolf]

2. Yes.

Add to that the blatant manipulation of the "data" used to assign that "failing" label to a school.

For example, last spring's test scores at my school:

We didn't make AYP. Just missed it. We didn't sweat it though, because this summer our state got their waiver.

Under the NEW, bolder, more vigorous system of high stakes testing and data crunching, our overall school score was .3 from being labeled "model."

Using the exact same data. The same teachers. The same students. The same teaching. The same test, the same set of test scores.

We went from "failing" to a hair away from "model."

Test scores can be used to accomplish whatever political agenda non-educators desire. It's all in the formula applied.

[Starry Messenger]

3. It's like something out of Kafka.

In the meantime, kids start to feel like failures because their school is labelled "failing", even though it is based on changeable systems like at your school.



Children aren't failures, and I wish we could just go back to teaching without this political witch-hunt going on.

[LWolf]

4. Your last line says it all,

and I don't know a single teacher who doesn't say much the same, on a regular basis.