Comment on the Muscota New School

Regarding the NYT article about grades for schools I sent around a few days ago (www.nytimes.com/2007/11/07/education/07schools.html ), which quoted one parent saying this:

some parents whose children attend those celebrated schools, largely in well-to-do neighborhoods, said they were perplexed by the way the grades were calculated. Others dismissed them as meaningless, saying they overemphasized standardized tests and improvement from 2006 to 2007.
 
“I find the methodology to be confusing, problematic and flawed,” said Emily Horowitz, who has a daughter at the Muscota New School in the Inwood section of Manhattan,  which received an F. Ms. Horowitz said that the grade “doesn’t mean anything” to her, and that parents were planning a rally this morning to “celebrate our  school.”

A friend wrote:

I worked at the school in District 6 where Muscota is located.  The school was passed from one building to another due to the fact that it always felt it did not have to have any accountability and no principal wanted it. The school does not believe in grades, texts, standardized tests, accountability, and takes pride in the fact that the students call staff by their first names. At the time, the school also, strangely, served a 90% + non-minority population in a district that is heavily latino ... interesting.

It's hard to find a better case study of why schools need to be rigorously evaluated and graded, with the results shared widely.  It's not high on my list of concerns if parents knowingly choose to send their kids to loosy-goosy schools in which kids, for example, aren't taught to read (though I feel sorry for the kids), but I think many parents don't realize what's really going on.  The schools sound so wonderful and tug at all of the liberal heartstrings, but if parents really knew that very little real learning was going on, they might have a different view.