Schools Brace to Be Scored on a Scale of A to F

This article in the NYT today is the beginning of the mother of a s&*tstorms that's about to break loose over the DOE giving every school in the city a letter grade and having it be on a forced curve.  I think this is the single boldest, most important reform undertaken by Bloomberg and Klein, but the media and pundits will have a field day attacking it -- which makes it all the more important that we reformers defend it as a critical accountability mechanism.  

By many measures, Intermediate School 289 is a place parents would be happy to send their children. This year, it was the only middle school in New York  City to achieve “blue ribbon” status, a marker of high achievement under the federal No  Child Left Behind Act. The leading public schools guidebook calls it a place where “solid academics” are combined with “attention to children’s social and emotional development.” Educators from around the country routinely descend upon the school, in Battery Park City, to shadow its teachers.
 
So when Ellen Foote, the school’s veteran principal, received a copy of the school’s new report card from the city’s Education Department, she was taken aback at the letter grade: D.

Some of the criticism will be fair, in the sense that this is a first year program that relies quite a bit on one year of growth data.  Let's say the evaulation system is wildly successful and achieves a 90% accuracy rate.  Well, with 1,400 or so schools in NYC, that means 140 schools will be wrongly judged (assume half too high and half too low, as perhaps is the case with IS 289, profiled in this article), meaning that the media will have 70 sob stories to write about great schools unfairly receiving bad grades, principals forced to give up all arts, a mindless race to the bottom of teaching only to the test, etc. -- I can see the headlines and storylines already.
 
Making it worse, there will be far more than 70 sob stories because what if you're a crappy principal of a failing school and your school receives a D or an F?  Are you going to say, "Ya got me!  I really do suck and so does my school.  I should be fired and so should half of my teachers -- or, better yet, just shut down my school."  Of course not!  Instead, the educators at failing schools will scream about how they've been wronged, how the rating system is unfair, forces them to teach to the test, blah, blah, blah...
 
I am sympathetic to the (hopefully few) schools that will unfairly receive bad grades -- I really am! -- but I care 10 times as much about identifying the hundreds of utterly failing schools and setting up a mechanism that will either lead to improving them or shutting them down.
 

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Schools Brace to Be Scored on a Scale of A to F
By JENNIFER MEDINA and ELISSA GOOTMAN  <http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/m/jennifer_medina/index.html?inline=nyt-per>  
NY TIMES November 4, 2007

By many measures, Intermediate School 289 is a place parents would be happy to send their children. This year, it was the only middle school in New York City to achieve “blue ribbon” status, a marker of high achievement under the federal No Child Left Behind Act. The leading public schools guidebook calls it a place where “solid academics” are combined with “attention to children’s social and emotional development.” Educators from around the country routinely descend upon the school, in Battery Park City, to shadow its teachers.