A-to-F grades for schools aren’t magic

Texas schools have been using letter grades, A through F, for well over 100 years as a way of judging student performance in individual courses.

Now many legislators and the governor want to use that same rating system for individual school campuses. It’s a way, they say, of bringing more transparency and enabling parents to better understand how well their children’s schools are doing.

The state Senate passed a bill this week along party lines, 20 (Republicans) to 10 (Democrats), that would institute the new grading beginning in the 2017-2018 school year.

The letter grades for each school would replace a system installed only a year ago that had just two ratings: “met standard” and “improvement required.”

That rating method supplanted a system that had been used for years that labeled individual campuses from “exemplary” to “academically unacceptable” — a practice phased out because, in part, the negative descriptions were said to stigmatize the school, its students and perhaps an entire community.

That is the same charge that Democratic opponents like Sen. Royce West of Dallas made during floor debate this week on Senate Bill 6.

Noting that many school district officials and the Texas PTA opposed the bill, West said, “This is a bad idea because schools that are stigmatized will mostly be minority and high poverty.”

The current campus rating system is much more detailed than the two-label designations suggest.

Along with the labels are individual school report cards, which include an academic performance index with scores for student achievement, student progress, closing performance gaps and post-secondary readiness.

Admittedly, a parent or guardian will have to go to some effort to get all the information they might want about a particular school, but it is available.

It seems that legislators think that a new rating system somehow automatically will improve education.

But expecting an A-through-F system to make that leap is naive.

To have a significant impact on student achievement, the state must invest in additional resources and quality leadership.

West was right when he said, “We know what the problem is — let’s work on the problem as opposed to relabeling the problem.”

This story was originally published April 1, 2015 at 5:47 PM with the headline "A-to-F grades for schools aren’t magic."