Tri-Creek leaders are concerned about the impact of school rankings on the bottom three categories formerly labeled as Academic Progress, Academic Watch and Academic Probation that will be revised with the letter grades of “C”, “D” and “F”. While we applaud the State Board of Education effort to improve the system by eliminating Annual Yearly Progress (AYP) from the criteria, we still have some concerns.
We do not want our schools to experience negative labeling that could result from unanticipated consequences and/or the misapplication of standards to reflect the letter grades. Our intention is to point to the flaws in the current system and to suggest recommendations for a useful school ranking system that strongly supports accountability through the recognition of student performance and improvement, not necessarily by ascribing a label to a school.
Schools can be at 80 percent proficiency or above and still fall into a C, D, or F category because of one sub-group, e.g., special needs, has not yet met the standard. This is particularly true since the threshold for accountability measures has been raised this year for all students.
With these contentions, we advocate that the school ranking changes focus on solutions to several issues. To further explore how this process is flawed and how it may be made more fair, please access this link.
http://www.iapss-in.org/page.php?pid=195
