Who are school grades for?

Today we continue Tuesday’s debate on school rating systems, plus feature must-read articles by Rick Kahlenberg, Dan Willingham, and Derek Thompson, among others.

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In the previous edition of SCHOOLED, I suggested that states face four options when deciding how to use measures for achievement and growth in their school rating systems (assuming they have one):

1. The Texas model, which means giving every school one grade for achievement and another grade for growth and then using the higher of the two grades as the final, official grade.

2. Turn the Texas model on its head by giving every school grades for both achievement and growth, but then use the lower of the two grades as the final, official grade.

3. Smoosh grades together by giving every school marks for achievement and growth (and perhaps other factors, as well) and then blending them together into a final grade.

4. Skip a summative rating and just give schools a grade for achievement and a grade for growth—and leave it at that.

Lots of y’all responded, either by email or on social media, with strong defenses of all four approaches.

1. The Texas Model

Here, it was Vlad Kogan, political scientist at Ohio State and author of the new book No Adult Left Behind, who offered the strongest defense of the Lone Star State’s approach, which results in A grades for schools that are strong on growth even if they are lackluster on achievement (as is the case for high-performing high-poverty schools).

If a school has high growth but low achievement, it’s doing all it can. What else do you want it to do that it’s not already doing? Why would you punish it for enrolling low-performing students (but growing them a lot)?

In other words, once you know the growth, what additional information about *school quality* (rather than student composition, which has nothing to do with quality the school can actually control) do achievement levels contain?

2. The upside-down Texas model

Frankly, I didn’t think anyone would come to the defense of this idea, which would mean giving a high-performing high-poverty school an F if it earned an A for growth but an F for achievement. But leave it to my colleague (and mentor) Checker Finn!

When it comes to rating schools, Mike’s Option 2—“turning the Texas model on its head”—is a terrific plan, as it will press hard for school strength in both proficiency and student progress.

For years, Mike and I have had a mostly-friendly debate about school ratings, and now he’s devised a worthy compromise, save for the fact that he doesn’t favor it himself! He would highlight progress and downplay proficiency on grounds that it’s the only way for schools serving disadvantaged kids to shine. I say it’s deceptive to give a summative A grade to any school that has lots of students who can barely read or cipher, just as it’s wrong to celebrate schools that add little value to their already-literate/numerate pupils.

Hurrah for Option 2!

3. Combining achievement and growth

Here, we turn to former Dallas school board member (and NCLB architect) Sandy Kress, who, like lots of Texan ed reformers I know, hates giving A grades to schools where lots of kids can’t read or do math on grade level.

I’m on team growth…until I’m not. Give boost of one level or maybe two when improvement knocks the ball out of the park. BUT never an A when achievement is a D or an F. Texas has done this. Terrible. Bottom line: If a majority of eighth grade students are below basic as they approach high school, their elementary and middle schools shouldn’t have been A’s or B’s.

4. Assigning grades for achievement and growth without a summative rating

Another ed reform stalwart from Texas, former Houston superintendent Terry Grier, likes this approach:

Schools should be graded on both growth and achievement—just like how we used to get separate marks for conduct and academics back in the day! It’s disingenuous to give schools a grade of B, when 50 percent of their students cannot read on grade level.

So does USC professor Morgan Polikoff.

I am on team “let’s not combine measures of different things into one overall measure.” I’ve spent a lot of the last couple years reviewing state school report cards for CRPE (last year’s report here, this year’s analysis tucked into the middle of their new math report).

If you take a look at the best-rated report cards, you can see that many of them keep indicators separate rather than aggregating them (for example, Illinois’s). Aside from the measurement issues (it’s just bad practice to cram together measures of different things for a single overall grade), I think parents have different things that they want to know about school performance, and what you want is a report that allows parents to find answers to the questions they actually have about school performance (this is actually how we conducted these analyses—by thinking about the questions parents were likely to have and determining how easy it was to find the answers to them).

As a side note, I think there is a great opportunity here for AI, which ought to be great at combing through data to answer a direct question from parents like “What are the ten best schools within ten miles of 90089 in terms of student achievement in math for students with disabilities?” or whatever it is a parent would like to know.

The focus on what parents want to know is something that Matt Ladner also picked up on:

The correct answer is: There is no correct answer. The best available answer is to turn this function over to private rating systems and let people self-select which system to utilize.

I make no claim that every private rating is great nor that every state system is absolutely useless at every given point in time (many started better and got worse), merely that the political incentives facing state rating systems draw them strongly towards trophies for everyone.

It has long been my observation that parents in [Arizona] largely ignore the state ratings (entirely reasonable in my opinion) and rely mainly upon their social networks, visits, and to a lesser degree, on private platforms like Greatschools.

Chad Aldeman agrees:

Matt’s point is an important one. The private market is running circles around state rating systems (and always will). That should change how we think about the state’s role here.

Chad’s right. How should we think about the state’s role here—especially in an age of private rating systems (many of them pulling from GreatSchools, which itself pulls from state data), and also the explosion of school choice? CRPE just published a helpful forum on this topic, organized by GreatSchools CEO John Deane, and featuring contributions from Tommy Chang, Alex Cortez, Ryan Delk, Jorge Elorza, Laura Hamilton, and Kimi Kean. It’s worth a read!

Here’s my take: If we’re focused on information for parents, keeping growth scores and achievement ratings separate makes sense, especially if we can carefully explain what they mean. Adding a bunch of other indicators that parents care about is important, too. As Morgan argued, using AI to let parents mix and match indicators as they see fit sounds super promising.

But if we’re talking about state accountability systems, the calculus is different. Let’s assume we’re actually going to do something with the ratings. For example, districts must close thousands of public schools in coming years because of low enrollment. The quality of schools should be a major factor in deciding which ones to shutter (along with the state of facilities, housing patterns, etc.). And there’s no doubt in my mind that we should judge “school effectiveness” like academic researchers would: based on student-level progress, year over year. In other words, growth. In terms of the Texas model, we’d want to close double-F schools—those low on achievement and growth.

With apologies to Checker, the worst thing we could do is close schools that are really good at helping students make gains over time, which could definitely happen if a high-poverty school with a D or an F for achievement but an A for growth was given a D or F as a final grade. Likewise with efforts to fix low-performing schools—assuming states ever get back to do that again.

What I’m less sure of is how to provide the best information for state and local decisions while also giving parents what they need. Do you have ideas? Please weigh in!

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• Wall Street Journal columnist Jason Riley says America’s “failing schools” are why we need highly skilled immigrants in STEM, citing my colleague Brandon Wright’s analysis of lackluster NAEP scores for our highest-achieving students. We love the plug but would also argue that this is no zero-sum game. We need to help America’s top students achieve their full potential and recruit the best and brightest from around the world.

• Meanwhile, Rick Kahlenberg is miffed that the College Board suspended its Landscape tool, perhaps in response to a scathing article by Naomi Schaeffer Riley (who is, yes, married to Jason). Landscape allowed college admissions officers to see a student’s achievement in relation to their peers, and to access lots of data about a high school’s neighborhood and socioeconomic demographics. Schaeffer sees it as a backdoor route to racial preferences in admissions; Kahlenberg thinks it was a helpful prod for schools to admit more low-income students of any race. “As a matter of fairness, it’s relevant to consider whether a student grew up in a high-crime or low-crime area, or where a lot of their peers come from single-parent homes,” he writes.

• James Shuls writes that “free speech is a right. Educators have a responsibility to use it wisely.” He makes a good case on the responsibility front, given the role teachers play in modeling good character. But in the K–12 context at least, I’m not sure he’s correct about the “free speech rights” part. I asked Education Next Legal Beat columnist Joshua Dunn for his take, and he responded: “It’s hazy, but generally private speech of government employees can still be punished if it undermines their ability to perform their work duties or the agency’s operations. My guess is that courts would say celebrating a political assassination on a campus would fit both of those for K–12 teachers.”

• Last week, it was Matt Yglesias who name-checked some of SCHOOLED’s favorite education writers; this week it’s fellow Substacker Derek Thompson’s turn. The Abundance co-author is “much more concerned about the decline of today’s thinking people than I am about the rise of tomorrow’s thinking machines.” That’s because “Americans are reading words all the time: email, texts, social media newsfeeds, subtitles on Netflix shows. But these words live in fragments that hardly require any kind of sustained focus; and, indeed, Americans in the digital age don’t seem interested in, or capable of, sitting with anything linguistically weightier than a tweet.” Thompson buttresses his argument with analyses by Chad Aldeman, Rose Horowitch, and James Marriott.

• On his Substack, Dan Willingham pens an impassioned and persuasive call for us adults to address students’ “sense of efficacy” in light of many disturbing trends for young people, including pervasive messages that there’s no reason to be hopeful for the future.

• On a related (but more optimistic) note, Chad Aldeman reports that the rates of teen depression and suicide are finally abating.

• Bruno Manno takes a global look at how well schools are preparing teenagers for work (not very).

• Jean Twenge complains that the parental controls on devices and social media apps don’t work—probably by design.

• Speaking of not working, Ben Austin thinks the Democrats’ anti-ed-reform message isn’t working politically and may cost them the White House in 2028.

• Rick Hess interviews Karla Phillips-Krivickas about the intersection of education savings accounts and students with disabilities.

• Just in time for the Harvard conference on emerging school models, Angela Watson and Matthew Lee set the record straight on homeschooling.

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Ryan Walters of Joke-lahoma (and Trump bibles) fame is resigning from his post as superintendent of the Sooner State. —Oklahoma Voice

Russia named the International Baccalaureate program a criminal organization, and the campaign against “Western hegemony” within its schools goes much further. —The New York Times

A decade-long study of infant and child brain development reveals that risk factors for reading disabilities emerge by about eighteen months, much earlier than previously assumed. —K.C. Compton, The 74