Poverty must be addressed to fix schools’ operation
At least one state official wants to, once again, eliminate letter grades as the bottom-line measure on the Ohio Department of Education’s annual evaluations of schools and school districts. Other proposed bills to change the state report cards reportedly are in the works.
As the General Assembly moves into the post-election lame-duck session, the last thing members should do is further tinker with the report cards.
Relying on politicians to create a system that measures schools’ performance fairly and provides the right incentives for improvement has proved futile for two decades, and it isn’t going to happen in the next month and a half.
The state has spent uncounted millions of dollars designing new measures and tests, and school districts likewise have spent millions complying and trying to meet higher marks. All that has been accomplished for certain is confirming what many already know: Poor academic performance, defined now as school failure, correlates directly with poverty.
Two recent Dispatch articles illustrate the futility.
A Friday article explained that state Board of Education member Lisa Woods of Medina wants the legislature to act before year’s end to eliminate A through F letter grades for the report cards, saying the report cards should focus on measuring growth, not winners and losers.
She has a point; the zillion and one factors that make up a school district’s performance hardly can be reduced to a spot on a fivepoint scale.
On the other hand, a search of the Dispatch archives would show dozens of articles featuring reformers insisting that the familiar A-F marks are the clearest way to convey to the public how a school or district is doing.
Accountability, after all, long has been the goal. Reformers were correct that, for decades, as students’ performance dropped and dropped, nothing tied the fates of teachers and principals to that of the students they were responsible for educating.
But how does the state create incentives for progress (which go hand in hand with penalties for lack of progress) and at the same time steer resources “to where they’re needed”?
A Thursday article illustrated that puzzle. Columbus City Schools officials are talking about how to raise their district’s performance above the F it received on last year’s report card, and their discussion highlighted a conundrum: Some Columbus schools have seen improved results, which they attribute to programs they paid for with grants set aside for the neediest, i.e. lowest-performing, buildings. Now that those schools’ performance numbers have improved, they could lose eligibility for the grants that made the improvement possible, and they fear they’ll backslide.
In a system in which socioeconomic status and the stability of the family have everything to do with how well students perform in school, perhaps reform efforts should focus more on helping with those things: better low-end wages and benefits, safer neighborhoods, mental-health and substance-abuse counseling and guidance for parents who aren’t themselves well educated.
Of course what happens in the classroom will always be important, and efforts to identify and encourage what works best always should be central.
Some might argue that poverty and family problems aren’t the province of public schools. But they most certainly are the burdens of public schools, and schools won’t get better without addressing them.