A school that refuses to be defined by a letter
“Good morning, boos.” Principal Keiko Dilbeck’s voice streams through Kino Junior High’s PA system on a weekday morning. The first few minutes of the school day are an eruption of activity as kids speed to class and teachers open their classroom doors.
Dilbeck’s morning greeting is always a gush of sunshine: Her more than 1,000 students are her “boos” or her “darlings.” They are children staring down infinite possibilities. They are the future, and her central Mesa school is the incubator.
Dilbeck is the principal of a D-graded school, according to the Arizona State Board of Education’s preliminary letter grades.
Teachers scrawl on the whiteboards of a D-graded school.
Students roam the halls of a D-graded school.
The state released its preliminary letter grades in October. Arizona law requires that its public and charter schools be graded either A, B, C, D or F, based on indicators that primarily rely on standardized-test scores.
Critics have long said the state’s letter-grading system is punitive to schools in impoverished areas, where poorer schools get lower grades. State officials said the revised grading system would be less reflective of inequality, although it’s unclear if the Board of Education achieved that.
About 60 percent of preliminary F grades and 51 percent of Ds were slapped on schools with 85 percent or more of students eligible for the free and reduced-price lunch program, according to analysis by The Arizona Republic. By comparison, 5 percent of schools with that level of poverty got A grades.
At Kino, 86 percent of students are eligible for the free and reduced-price lunch program, an indicator of poverty. More than a third of residents living in the school’s surrounding neighborhood fall below the poverty line, more than twice the rate of Mesa proper, according to census data.
To Dilbeck, a former English teacher, the D sometimes feels like a scarlet letter. Why doesn’t the state put more stock in the school’s civic-engagement award? Or the recognition its received for its college-readiness program? Or the Kino students she’s seen master English as a second language after years of struggling?
“I feel like that letter grade is more like a letter grade or representation of our state leadership — of what they’ve allowed education to become,” Dilbeck said.
Some schools have bucked the trend: 85 percent of students are eligible for free and reduced-price lunch at Whitman Elementary in Mesa, which got an A grade from the state. But many A schools, 50 percent, are composed of 20 percent or fewer students eligible for free and reduced-price lunch, compared with 4 percent of D-graded schools with the same range of free or reduced-price lunch students.
According to the state board’s definitions, D schools are deemed minimally performing, while “F” schools are considered failing.
Grading was paused from 2014 until last year as students adjusted to the new AzMERIT test. About 90 percent of a K-8 school’s preliminary letter grade is based on testing, according to the system hatched by the State Board of Education following state law.
Federal law is a bit looser with its assessment requirements. The Every Student Succeeds Act, passed in December 2015, requires states to assess schools using certain indicators and identify those in need of intervention, but the law lets states take it from there.
The state board stressed that these are preliminary grades, while hundreds See SCHOOL, Page 13A