Utah's School Grading moves education the right direction

Maybe the Utah legislature really does hate public education.

Or maybe the legislature just wants to make it easier for parents to know how their school is doing.

On September 1, Utah’s public schools received grades based on criteria set by the Utah legislature and set down in statute. For the first time ever, parents can quickly and easily find out how well their school is performing relative to other schools in Utah.

Following the same grading scale that we have been accustomed to receiving from our teachers for generations, schools were graded with As, Bs, Cs, Ds, and Fs. The purpose, ostensibly, is to impose a level of transparency and accountability not previously applied to public schools in Utah. In essence, the purpose of the grades is to answer two questions:

Are students performing at grade level?
Are students achieving enough academic growth?

According to Senate President Wayne Neiderhauser and House Speaker Becky Lockhart, that means looking at how many students are progressing a full year in each grade. Failure to progress a full year means that a student falls behind. It’s a fairly traditional measure.

At the high school level, an additional criteria is added: are students ready for college and life after high school. This is measured by ACT scores and high school graduation (which, as almost anyone can tell you, is probably insufficient to tell whether a student is ready for college. With colleges requiring more and more students to attend remedial math and writing courses, it’s increasingly clear that too many high school grads are walking through college doors unprepared).

As Neiderhauser and Lockhart said in an email to their respective Houses prior to the release of the grades, the information should shed a light on schools that ought to start discussions about how and where to make improvements:

Utah’s grading system will shine a light on things that sometimes get swept under the rug. Utah’s Achievement Gap is one example. Your favorite school may have fantastic, high-profile programs for which they’ve received public accolades. However, if Hispanic students at that institution are dropping out at an abysmal rate, it hasn’t earned an A, and will not until that situation improves.

These grades should invite discussion, education, intervention, and improvement.

Shockingly (or perhaps not so shockingly), the public education establishment revolted.

And, like a helicopter parent who swoops in to reprimand a teacher for the child’s failure to earn good grades, some in the media accused the legislature of having it in teachers. It’s a ploy to make schools look bad and reignite the school voucher issue, they say. Further, they say President Neiderhauser has refused to refine the law, to compromise, to fix any of the problems with how schools are graded.

Rather than accept transparency and accountability as an opportunity to strengthen public education, lead members of the education establishment complained about the amount of money Utah spends on public education. This ignores that public education as a share of state spending is 49.5% of state appropriations, up from 42.7% in 2007.

Taking umbrage at the criticisms, Senator Todd Weiler said he was disappointed that the education community is afraid of accountability and that their argument that these grades are “coming out of nowhere” is disingenuous.

“Maybe someday in the future the focus will be on helping our kids graduate,” Weiler said, “instead of attacking the legislature.”

SB271, the law passed in the 2013 legislative session, was only the third of three bills that set up the school grading system over the last three years.

Weiler’s frustration seems warranted given the public education establishments’ negative response is despite legislative leaders’ acknowledgment that there is room for improvement in the school grades law and have been earnest in trying to find ways to improve the law.

Mostly this means listening to education leaders and seeking their input and direction. According to an email from Senate chief of staff Ric Cantrell to a member of the news media (the “real” news media, like the type that lays of 19 staffers and calls it a “reorganization”), the organizations involved in forming the bill were many and included

the Foundation for Excellence in Education (Jeb Bush’s Foundation), Parents for Choice in Education, and the Utah Technology Commission. On the other side, the Utah Public Education Coalition (UPEC)has been active and generally negative toward School Grading. UPEC is made up of reps from the USOE, UEA, PTA, Patti Harrington’s groups (School Boards Association, Superintendents Association and maybe one other), and a couple school board members. Maybe some others. Our calendars show a plethora of meetings with UPEC and their parent organizations.

At the end of the day, though, the standards are set by the Utah Board of Education. Despite the meetings to find a way to tweak the law, to improve, legislators looking for compromise were often frustrated each time with the same response from education leaders: the system’s fine and we don’t need a more transparency than we already have.

Hogwash.

In the weeks since the grades came out, I have frequently asked people about their school. Did they hear about the grades? What grade did their school receive?

Without a single exception, every single parent knew what their schools’ grades were. (Occasionally they even knew the grades for their rival school, too). People knew the grades, and they were talking about them.

That’s something that previous accountability systems–no matter how vaunted the public school establishment says they are–have never accomplished. They may have been useful for education officials to discuss among themselves, but they are less than optimal for parents with less than a masters degree in education or statistics.

The new grading system may have kinks that the legislature must work out, but it’s a big step in the right direction.

By making the system clear to the most important stakeholders to public education, and by that I mean the parents, the legislature made it easy for parents to start the conversation with the administrators and teachers in their schools.

No wonder public education officials are panicked. They’re not used to parents having the tools to evaluate their children’s schools.

Learn more about the new grading system at Utah School Grading.