Arizona should get rid of grades for schools

Robert Robb

Submitted photo/Robert Robb

Arizona’s system of student testing and grades for schools isn’t producing the intended effects. Students aren’t hitting college prep proficiency standards. Grades for schools don’t provide any useful information for parents and taxpayers.”

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OPINION — Since 2011, the state, pursuant to legislation, has given a grade to individual public schools on the familiar A-F spectrum.

The idea was to provide parents and taxpayers with an understandable assessment of the quality of education provided by individual schools.

From the beginning, it was a colossal failure. These school grades haven’t ever provided useful information about school quality, absolutely or relatively.

Initially, the governing statute said that the average grade for schools was to be a C. However, from the beginning, most schools received a grade of A or B. Whether the average was to be the median or the mean, the state’s school-grading system couldn’t pass a math test.

In 2016, legislation dropped the average C requirement. Instead, the approach was to enumerate the key factors considered to constitute a high-performing school and set up a grading system in which, theoretically, every school could earn an A. The factors were considerably expanded to include things other than how students did on the state’s achievement test.

The result was even more rampant grade inflation. A recent report by the state auditor general documents how meaningless and useless these grades have become as 92% of high schools received an A or a B, as did 75% of elementary and middle schools. Meanwhile, fewer than half of students scored proficient on the state achievement test.

Hence the Orwellian paradox: Our students aren’t learning what we think they should be learning, but our schools are doing great.

The state Board of Education is in the process of tweaking the grading system for schools. It’s a useless exercise. The system is irremediable. Instead, the entire school-testing regimen should be blown up and restarted from scratch. And grades for schools shouldn’t be part of it.

That, however, is outside the remit of the board, which has no choice but to make a Sisyphean effort to render the school-grading system more meaningful and useful. Blowing things up and starting over requires legislative action. The testing regimen for students should be monumentally simplified and trimmed. And for schools, there should be just disclosures of how their students did on the simplified exam.

The current system is designed to get every student college ready, which is neither realistic nor desirable. For reading, writing and math, highly detailed standards have been established for Grades 3-8. The state achievement test is a monstrous thing that covers all these highly detailed standards.

There is an elaborate process for determining the standards. The state contracts with a private vendor to administer the test. There is also an elaborate process for vetting specific test questions.

Given that schools are graded partially on how their students perform on this test, it drives a lot of what occurs in the classroom. Many schools impose paperwork accountability requirements on their teachers to document that the standards are being taught. It’s a contributor to teacher burnout.

For the grades given to schools, there are compounding levels of subjectivity. The state divides student performance on the achievement test into four categories: minimally proficient, partially proficient, proficient and highly proficient. The demarcation between categories is at least somewhat subjective. The proficient cut line is geared toward college readiness. I would argue, even beyond that. I’ve used math throughout my career, but I can guarantee you that I wouldn’t test proficiently on the state’s eighth-grade math exam.

For high schools, the default achievement test is the ACT, which is designed to test college preparedness. The performance of their students on the test is only 50% of the school’s grade. The rest of the grade is based on other factors, such as their graduation rate. For elementary and middle schools, their student test scores are 80% of their overall grade.

So, the cut score for proficiency on the student exam is somewhat subjective. The relative weight given to the various factors in the grade for schools is highly subjective, as is the award of points for some of the factors. Then there is a subjective decision as to what overall score is required for each grade designation for schools.

The subjectivity and uselessness are about to get worse. The 2016 legislation mandated not only an overall grade based upon a variety of factors, but also a letter grade for each of the factors. The board has ignored this requirement but, prodded by the audit, is about to attempt it.

So, each high school will receive a letter grade for five individual factors and an overall grade as well, so six letter grades in total. Each elementary and middle school will receive a letter grade for four individual factors in addition to an overall grade, or five letter grades in total.

Who in the world will benefit from all that?

I’ve long felt that state-mandated testing should be limited to reading comprehension and basic math, or what used to be known as business math. Those are the keys that unlock all other learning. If students have those fundamental skills, they will be equipped for whatever level of education they want to pursue, at whatever stage in their life they want to pursue it.

There are off-the-shelf tests for those things that can measure how a student compares to students nationally and in the state. They wouldn’t take up more than a half day of class time.

For schools, how their pupils performed on those tests could be reported as well as how much progress their students made on them over time. These would be objective factors, no subjectivity involved. Parents and taxpayers could decide what to make of the results.

There’s a question of whether such a simplified and trimmed down approach would comply with the testing requirements to get federal funds. Federal law is now somewhat contradictory about testing. Some parts of federal law dictate rigorous comparative assessments, but other parts encourage flexibility. It probably wouldn’t take much to make this simplified and trimmed down testing and reporting regimen federally compliant.

Arizona’s system of student testing and grades for schools isn’t producing the intended effects. Students aren’t hitting college prep proficiency standards. Grades for schools don’t provide any useful information for parents and taxpayers.

Instead, test for the fundamentals and report objective results. Otherwise, free up schools, administrators and teachers to engage and educate kids in diverse ways. Get rid of the straitjacket.

That’s also the approach most compatible with a robust system of school choice.

Retired Arizona journalist Robert Robb opines about politics and public policy. Reach him at robtrobb@gmail.com. Please submit comments at yourvalley.net/letters or email them to AzOpinions@iniusa.org. We are committed to publishing a wide variety of reader opinions, as long as they meet our Civility Guidelines.