We have a problem in Maine and in education. The recent release of Maine’s school report cards illustrates my contention. Here’s a sampling of recent comments about the DOE’s report cards for Maine schools.
“Letter grades for our schools are simple, easy to understand and provide a manner in which to compare performance results between schools.” Brian Lippold, North Yarmouth
“The Department of Education ranking system is based largely on each school’s performance on standardized tests. The agency developed the system internally, without input from Maine teachers, superintendents or school board members, whose experiences confirm what researchers have known for years….. Maine’s school ranking system and school improvement plan are both centered on the same flawed premise — that standardized test scores accurately reflect what a school has to offer.” Portland Press Herald, May 10
“The goal is to offer “a snapshot of where their school is at,” an Education Department spokesman told the Press Herald.” Portland Press Herald, May 1.
Superintendent Paul Stearns of MSAD 4, in the Guilford area, took issue with the use of a bell curve and used three private Maine education institutions — Colby, Bates and Bowdoin colleges — to illustrate his point. “One of them would get a C, one would be an A and one would be an F,” he said. “I don’t believe any of those institutions isn’t an A.” Bangor Daily News, May 1.
“Schools received the criteria used to develop the grades last week and their actual grades on Monday.” Bangor Daily News, May 1.
In Portland, Superintendent Emmanuel Caulk is reaching out to his community. Casco Bay High School received a B while Deering and Portland High Schools each received Ds. The district’s elementary school grades ranged from A to F. Caulk said he laments the fact that the Department of Education’s grading system is much simpler than the system used to grade individual students.
“When students receive grades in our schools, it is based on a diverse body of evidence and complex assessments to help inform education decisions and support student learning and achievement,” he wrote in a letter to parents. “Unfortunately, the state system to grade our schools is not that complex. … No one in the education field today believes one standardized test a year is an accurate measure of student progress or school quality, yet Maine is primarily using that simplistic system. Since annual standardized tests measure progress during the previous year, they are a snapshot in time that is more than 2 years old.” Bangor Daily News, May 1.
Advocates for giving schools letter grades say their familiarity and simplicity is what makes them work, but Jacobsen said that also makes them dangerous. “Everyone thinks they know what an A or a B or a C means, and it can obscure that effort to find out what does it mean,” Rebecca Jacobsen, Michigan State University. (Kennebec Journal, May 2).
The issue? We have been grading students for years using the same shoddy approaches to assessment employed by the DOE. How many students might see something familiar in complaints about not being aware of the criteria that they were to be assessed against for their letter grade? How many would question whether the few big exams, projects, or assessments used in their grade didn’t reflect what they learned? For those really thoughtful students the idea that their work and learning could be rolled into one letter grade might cause them to pause. I won’t even suggest that any reputable school in Maine is still grading on the curve, here the DOE has headed into the same discredited territory as measuring cranial capacity or IQ testing as measures of learning.
Maine schools have been tarred with the same brush that we are guilty of using too often. Schools regularly report student learning with the same reporting structure used by the Maine DOE. How much does your student’s A-F grade really tell you about what they learned? How easily do we accept this as a fair measure when we combine students work, even using a “diverse body of evidence and complex assessments” (Superintendent’s Caulk words) into a simple letter grade at the end of a reporting period?
Others have pointed to a different way, standards based grading (see here and here), with far more eloquence than I will try to capture here. However, the real benefit of a standards based assessment system is that it avoids the issues noted above. We want to be clear with Maine schools how they are being assessed, how it is related to what they do day to day,what they are being assessed on, and what they need to do to improve. None of these are present in the Gov’s plan or the DOE’s report card.
Are they present in the grades we give our students? Or is our goose cooked?
Punctuated Equilibria 