Going beyond a report card
On the surface, it sounds reasonable — assign letter grades to individual public schools to help parents better assess the education their children are getting. School report cards were one of Gov. Susana Martinez’s signature education reforms, in fact. For the past five years, across New Mexico, school communities have waited to see these all-important scores. This year, Santa Fe Public Schools administrators are pleased to see that 11 schools improved their grades, 10 stayed constant and nine dropped. The gap between high-achieving and low-achieving schools seems to be narrowing. That’s promising.
What remains unfortunate, both for Santa Fe and across the state, is it’s still hard to say exactly how the grades are determined. As we have pointed out before, even a team of Los Alamos National Laboratory scientists say the system through which the Public Education Department calculates grades is too complex to understand. Measures thrown into the mix include student performance on standardized tests, student attendance, graduation rates and parental involvement. How those factors are calculated, though, is not generally understood.
We have no issue with letting parents know how their children’s schools are performing; however, to do so with so little transparency does no one any favors. This system needs to change. In the coming campaign, candidates for governor should discuss ways they can keep parents informed without resorting to complicated systems that appear ripe for manipulation.
Perhaps a report card is not the best — or most efficient or cost-effective — way of presenting information. In fact, rather than collecting a multitude of data, throwing the numbers into some sort of formula and coming up with a grade, why not just present the data? Such items as test scores, the student absentee rate, the free and reduced-price lunch numbers and graduation attendance rates could be posted on each school’s website and required to be sent to news outlets. Then, parents and others could evaluate for themselves, saving the time it takes for bureaucrats to crunch the numbers. (Of course, changes will be difficult because New Mexico’s plan to meet requirements under the federal Every Student Succeeds Act has been accepted.)
The main conclusion — and this is hardly surprising — is that schools with poorer kids perform worse on the measures that make up the report card. In Santa Fe, 11 schools have more than 95 percent of students enrolled in the free and reducedprice lunch program, a federal indicator of poverty. Of those, nine received a D or an F this year. Contrast that to the six Santa Fe schools with only 25 percent to 30 percent of students enrolled in the federal lunch program. That’s the lowest rate of poverty, and those schools all earned an A or B.
As Superintendent Veronica García said, poverty is “certainly a factor, but it’s not an excuse. All of our kids can learn. We have to look at what we can do to help mitigate those impacts.”
Responsibility to offset the effects of poverty cannot be assigned only to a school district. This is where the community comes in — whether through volunteering, donating money or taking an interest in curriculum and supporting classroom teachers. There are state responsibilities as well. That includes adequate funding — especially for programs shown to improve performance, such as prekindergarten classes, additional instructional time in K-3 to close the achievement gap, as well as as targeted reading and math support. Plenty of physical activity, including healthy doses of recess, likely do more to improve achievement than most socalled reforms.
Other ways to improve? Ensure kids have a solid breakfast and a substantial lunch, can visit the dentist or doctor as needed and have access to counseling or other supports. Tracking down students who miss school and keeping them in their seats is essential. The more students who show up, ready to learn every morning, the greater opportunity for teachers and school staff to focus on educating rather than mitigating.
Success stories such as Piñon Elementary School — an A school despite more than 60 percent of its students receiving lunch aid and about 16 percent learning English — have to be replicated. While we remain skeptical of the school grades as currently figured and presented, we believe measuring performance provides useful data to help all children succeed.
The report cards are in. Now, the challenge is to share smart strategies between schools. That way, students can gain the educations they deserve — not so their school gets an A, but for their future successes.