After dispensing high marks to 97 percent of the city’s elementary schools last year, the Department of Education is determined to be a tougher grader. It’s instating a new cut-throat system in which schools will be ranked against one another, and no good grades will be given for “effort”: only 25 percent of schools will get A’s, 30 percent B’s, 30 percent C’s, 10 percent D’s, and the bottom 5 percent of schools will get F’s. Like any grading curve, this one is already being called unfair and is sure to be unpopular, but will it slim down the previous bloated system or just confuse it?
By all accounts the statistics-heavy new system—a “growth percentile model” by which students are compared with peers who scored similarly on the previous year’s test—is hard to wrap your head around. One thing is certain though: it will reduce the number of schools getting A’s and B’s. “We want to be able to really show how much value a school is actually adding,” said Shael Polakow-Suransky, the department’s chief accountability officer.
Still, many teachers are saying the tough-love reform is just mean. “I guess after last year’s debacle the only thing they could figure out was to fix the scores beforehand,” Michael Mulgrew, the president of the United Federation of Teachers told the NY Times. “But as a teacher, if I went in determined to fail 5 percent of my students, I would not be doing my job.”
