State gets an ‘F’ for report card system

Most of us are familiar with the famous cartoon where Charlie Brown tries to kick a football, only to have Lucy pull it away at the last second.

Imagine that he actually gets to kick the ball, and kicks it straight every time, but instead of scoring a field goal, this time it’s the goalposts that move before the ball can get there. Imagine that frustration.

Now you have some sense of what it’s like to be a school administrator in Ohio these days. The state issued new report cards for all districts last week, and most of them received a lot of D’s and F’s for the same accomplishments that got them A’s and B’s just a year ago.

How can that be, you ask? The state moved the goalposts, again. It increased the standards that need to be met, leaving many school superintendents — a pretty bright bunch, mind you — scratching their heads and wondering what else they might do to make the grade, so to speak.

The report cards were originally created as a way to help schools, and parents, and taxpayers, understand whether their school districts were performing well or not. Those early report cards were flawed, but at least everybody understood most of what they were looking at and could see ways to make improvements.

That’s because the standards were largely the same each year. They’re not any more; the standards have changed so often in the past few years that they’re basically useless as a measure of progression.

That means a bunch of bad grades for school districts that can’t explain them, often to the same voters they then ask for tax renewals or increases, because they’re still over-reliant on local property taxes for funding. Our schools aren’t any worse than they were when they got last year’s glowing reviews, but explain that to the casual voter who only studies the letter grades assigned and doesn’t delve into the state’s data on actual testing results.

Without some consistent way to measure year-over-year performance, we now have absolutely no idea if our schools are showing consistent improvement, or if they’re backsliding. We’re getting dangerously close to the time when school district leaders ignore the report cards altogether. More than one superintendent around the state was quoted in by various media as saying they’ll focus on the metrics that make sense and ignore the rest. Who decides which are the ones that make sense?

It’s absolutely important to hold our school districts accountable, and there’s nothing wrong with raising the bar on standards, in principle. However, doing it every year makes no sense. The vast majority of our schools are not failing, as this latest round of report cards would have us believe.

We call on the Ohio Department of Education, Gov. John Kasich and the General Assembly to craft a plan for testing that will be in place for longer than an election cycle. A five- or 10-year plan, at minimum, would give districts time to fairly implement and evaluate curricula and students.

As long as we’re willing to talk about arbitrary letter grades, we’ll offer one of our own. We hereby give the state of Ohio an “F” for failing to deliver a common-sense, evidence-based, consistent method of tracking school district performance. Schools are drifting back toward focusing on their own measures and tuning out what the state has to say. Voters have no idea if their districts are performing well or not.

And the poor students are still cramming for tests that matter so much for their futures, even as districts flail about trying to keep up with the ever-changing state standards.

This system isn’t fair to the students. It isn’t fair to the teachers. It’s not fair to administrators. It’s not fair to parents. And it’s not fair to voters trying to make sense of it all.

That is the definition of a failed system.