For South Bronx Academy for Applied Media, receiving an A in the city school rankings was a vindication, said the principal, Roshone Ault.
Emily Borges teaching English at South Bronx Academy for Applied Media earlier this month.
New York Grades Set Off Debate on Judging Schools
Not long after Schools Chancellor Joel I. Klein announced plans last year to give grades of A through F to schools, principals at some of New York City’s coveted specialized high schools grew concerned. With the city looking to reward gains among the lowest-achieving students, how would the elite schools be judged?
The principals peppered the administration with ideas for extra credits for their schools: perhaps counting how many Advanced Placement tests students pass or the college credits they accumulate. In the end, the city decided to tie bonus points for these schools to high scores on state Regents exams.
That served the gold-standard Stuyvesant High School well, propelling it from a high B to a comfortable A. But the principal of Brooklyn Technical High School, Randy J. Asher, called the decision “ridiculous,” saying it contradicted a core principle of the report cards: the need to gauge how far students have come, rather than simply how they perform.
“I think we all really came to the table saying, let’s find something fair for schools like ours,” Mr. Asher, whose school earned a B, said in a recent interview. “And I don’t think we succeeded.”
Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg has called the report cards released this month the best way to “hold a principal’s feet to the fire.”
Behind the simple grades are several years’ worth of critical and painstaking decisions about how to measure achievement, what to measure, and when to acknowledge that certain qualities in a school cannot be measured.
But instead of definitively establishing how New York City’s public schools stack up, the grades have set off an impassioned debate about just how schools should be judged.
James S. Liebman, the schools’ chief accountability officer and the architect of the report cards, said that he welcomed the dialogue. “I have a number of e-mails that start with, ‘How could my school get this grade?’” he said in an interview. “And that’s exactly the right question.”
Such questions are also surfacing across the country and producing a variety of conclusions.
In Florida, where former Gov. Jeb Bush put in place a school grading system in 2002, hundreds of schools that have received A’s from the state have landed on the list of failing schools under the federal No Child Left Behind law. In California, the state’s Academic Performance Index, which has been repeatedly altered since it was instituted in 1999, has been criticized by some parents and business leaders as inscrutable.
“Discussion and debate is fine and healthy, but we need to quickly come to some consensus about how to judge schools,” said Michael J. Petrilli, a vice president at the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation in Washington, which supports the school accountability movement. “If there’s anything an accountability system is supposed to do, it’s to provide transparency to the public.”
It took Mr. Klein and his staff several years to put together the report card system, which entailed hundreds of conversations with principals, statisticians, labor leaders, testing experts and scholars. Many of its basic contours have roots in other places.
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