Opinion: Even Post-COVID, A-F School Ranking System Should Get an F
We should take this moment to evaluate the utility of the A-F system as a whole, as it does not sufficiently capture the nuance of the work being done in our schools
By Rolf Straubhaar, Fri., Oct. 2, 2020
For the last two years, alongside first-day photos and school supplies shopping, a big part of the back-to-school season here in Texas has been the release of the Texas Education Agency's A-F school rankings. Designed by the administration of current Texas Education Commissioner Mike Morath, the ostensible purpose of these rankings has been to give parents, taxpayers, and homeowners an easy way to rank and compare the performance of our public schools as we decide where to send our children to school or where to buy a home.
Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the A-F ranking and evaluation of schools was suspended in 2020, as was the STAAR exam which forms a significant portion of the A-F system's evaluation criteria. If you go on the accountability section of TEA's website today, you will see a one-sentence explanation that "All districts and campuses are labeled Not Rated: Declared State of Disaster for 2020."
As a parent of public school children, a former public school teacher, and a current professor of educational leadership and policy at a public university, I was heartened by this. In the two years that these rankings have been in effect, I have seen them used to make decisions that have had serious and punitive impacts on those schools most in need of support.
Part of what is most dangerous about the A-F system is its simplicity, which can overlook or mask important contextual differences between schools and their communities.
While I have focused my career on studying the policy impacts of accountability structures and grades, the arbitrary and capricious nature of the A-F grading system is pretty recognizable to anyone who has been subjected to it.
When I was between my sophomore and junior years in high school, my family moved to Austin from out of state and my parents and I went through the process of transferring my records into Austin ISD. My previous high school had used the A-F letter grade system, while AISD graded secondary subjects on a 0-100 scale.
As is still AISD policy today, there was a chart used to convert these grades – that is, all A's transferred in as 96s, all A-minuses as 92s, and so on. In my previous district, there were no pluses or minuses, so anything above a 90 was an A. While I had straight A's, I had hardly gotten a 96 or higher in all of my high school courses. As a result, I experienced some serious grade inflation and automatically jumped pretty high in our class rankings simply by virtue of moving school districts.
While on one level I of course selfishly liked this, as it gave me a big leg up in preparing my college applications, that "big leg up" was not earned in any way. My performance in my previous classes had not changed. My understanding of ninth-grade English or world history had not changed. But my grades had – and as a result I was suddenly perceived as smarter and more competitive to prospective colleges. The simplicity of a system that gauged my learning on a scale of five options (A, B, C, D, F) now seemed overly simplistic and somewhat arbitrary.
An A-F system for grading schools and school systems is just as simplistic and arbitrary as an A-F system for grading students. Just as privileged students (like I was) experience grade inflation, the A-F rankings of privileged schools are inflated by contextual benefits, like richer neighborhoods, which have larger PTA budgets and produce a higher property tax base. On the other hand, just as minoritized students can have their high school careers derailed by punitively negative grades, so can the schools serving those students be derailed by high-stakes accountability policies when their A-F rankings drop for reasons outside their control.
Of all the policies COVID-19 is causing us to reconsider this year, let's put the A-F school rankings system at the top of the list.
Rolf Straubhaar is an assistant professor of educational leadership and school improvement at Texas State University. He lives in San Marcos with his wife and five children, who attend local San Marcos public schools.
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