Calling all Texas School Leaders: This is an A-F SOS!
Across the state of Texas right now, alarms are sounding.If you were at the TASA Midwinter Conference in Austin last week, you saw firsthand the exasperation on people’s faces.
The state’s new A-F rating system, in which school districts are assigned a letter grade based on a set of predetermined performance metrics, has school leaders and families up in arms.
In an open video to his school community, Dr. Jim Chadwell, superintendent of Eagle Mountain-Saginaw ISD, said the new system offers a narrow and dangerously unfair view of school success.
Among his reasons:
- The ratings are based primarily on standardized test scores
- Similar systems have not worked in other states
- The ratings do not account for socio-economic variables, such as poverty
- The ratings do not also include suggestions for practical improvement
- The ratings create a false sense of shame and failure among teachers and students
“Don’t be fooled,” Chadwell tells his school community in the video. “This new system will not reflect how well a school or district is educating its students.”
Chadwell is far from the system’s only critic. Across the state, school leaders are sending out an SOS on A-F.
‘Greatness demands intentionality’
The system’s opponents say their opposition is not about making excuses for schools; it’s about demanding better from local accountability planning. The purpose of every school-based evaluation should be to form an accurate picture of performance, and to outline a pathway for continuous improvement.
Because A-F is broad and largely inaccurate in its representation of schools, it stands to have a deep negative impact on those in the trenches, including teachers and students who are making progress. This denigration of academic self-worth harbors significant potential emotional and financial costs for schools.
Anticipating this, some forward-thinking school leaders have sought to write their own narrative based on community feedback. In Denton ISD, Superintendent Dr. Jamie Wilson and his team worked with K12 Insight to create the What We Value initiative, a massive community engagement effort that asks community members, including teachers and parents, to share what school success means to them. (Check it out.)
Wilson says the goal is to be intentional in their work, making decisions based on feedback from the people who “they are truly accountable to,” not a letter grade handed down by the state.
Veteran school researcher Dr. Shelby McIntosh, managing director, Southwest, K12 Insight, says there is a checklist of more than 200 items that Texas school districts must consider when creating more intentional community engagement, from strategic planning and survey writing to promotion to analyzing community feedback.
Don’t throw up your hands in the face of A-F. There is a proven process out there that works.
Learn more:
If you work in Texas schools, the A-F debate isn’t going away anytime soon. To learn more about the work that Denton and other districts are doing, reach out to Dr. McIntosh at shelby.mcintosh@k12insight.com, or call her: 703-483-5979.