IDEA Public Schools, Texas' largest charter network, are trying to get the state to release A-F accountability grades for schools, reports Talia Richman in the Dallas Morning News. "The Texas Education Agency is blocked from publishing the scores after a group of five public school districts secured a temporary restraining order" by complaining the new AI-assisted grading system is inaccurate.
IDEA leaders say parents need a standardized system to compare schools, especially if they're considering a charter. The network expects to retain its B rating, though some schools have earned lower scores this year on the state test.
Nationwide, state report cards are doing a poor job of informing parents about school performance data, writes USC Professor Morgan Polikoff on The 74. He's the lead author of a new study from the Center on Reinventing Public Education that grades the states: Seven get an "A" for tracking performance over time, spotlighting Covid-related learning loss. Twenty-one get a "D" or an "F."
Even in the better states, many report cards make it hard for parents to compare schools and for advocates to understand how subgroups, such as students with disabilities and English Learners, are doing, writes Polikoff.
"Some websites were easy to navigate, while others were befuddling," he writes. Analysts had to spend a lot of time searching for information.
Hawaii won praise for its “beautiful, easy-to-operate data visualization tool that produces exceptionally clear graphs,” notes Erica Meltzer on Chalkbeat. "Pennsylvania and Oklahoma were also singled out for praise on usability, as well as for how easy they made it to see change over time."
This Bush-era approach to centralized accountability never produced a "Texas education miracle", failed to achieve anything approaching 100 per cent proficiency by 2014, and should have its remainders in the ludicrously titled "Every Student Succeeds Act" repealed: if a president like Johnson wants to transfer extra funding to poor schoolteachers, that's fine, as long as it's paid for (not borrowed from future taxpayers, since U.S. federal investments in primary & secondary education have not produced satisfactory returns to our nation), but these funds should be disbursed as block grants, to be spent as educationally sovereign states choose (most should go to municipal basic schools, to be spent as individual [not district] school boards see fit).