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The fact that no one has yet to find the silver bullet for curing all that ails education hasn’t stopped many from trying. Hence, the Indiana Department of Education’s resurrection of a plan to assign letter grades to schools.
It’s an idea considered and rejected years ago when education officials set up a reporting system for Public Law 221, the state’s version of the federal No Child Left Behind accountability law. Now, with a new state superintendent, the proposal is back – still as flawed as it was the first time.
In 2001, the Indiana Education Roundtable thoughtfully rejected letter grades. It debated labels ranging from “exemplary” to “unsatisfactory,” with the State Board of Education ultimately settling on “academic probation” as the lowest category of placements based on the percentage of students who pass the ISTEP+ test and improvement over three years.
Tony Bennett, state superintendent of public instruction, is now pushing to replace the categories with letter grades.
“I would love to have a statewide system of accountability that means something and that people understand,” he said.
He points to Florida, where former Gov. Jeb Bush installed a letter-grade system and recently pitched it to Indiana officials. But the success of Florida’s accountability system is mixed, at best. It’s true that communities there boast of having “A” schools, but the connection between school letter grades and student achievement is unclear.
While there’s no research to show why letter grades are better than the current system Indiana uses, there are data to suggest detrimental effects. A 2009 study from the University of Florida found that donations from parents and local businesses fall when a school receives a poor grade.
“We estimate that a school receiving a grade of ‘F’ will experience a drop in contributions of two-thirds or more,” writes Larry Kenny, a University of Florida economics professor. “What was particularly surprising in this study was the magnitude of the cutbacks; the numbers are very large. These contributions help schools, and losing this money lowers the quality of education.”
Another study, updated in 2004, found evidence that the school grade assignments affect housing values, although the effects may diminish over time.
“These results suggest that innocuous-seeming school classifications may have large distributional implications,” according to authors David N. Figlio and Maurice E. Lucas, “and that policymakers should exercise caution when classifying schools.”
In the end, what really matters is what the state does with the results of the accountability measures. Engaging in a stale and time-consuming debate over grades or labels represents a step backward when the Department of Education should instead be explaining what it will do to improve schools consistently falling into the lowest category. A push for assigning school grades is a distraction from that work and should be dropped. It’s time for the state to stop with the name-calling and offer substantive, research-based plans for raising achievement.
