According to the Los Angeles Times, LAUSD is considering implementing a new ranking system, giving schools a rating from 1 to 5.
I quit.
The main thesis of this site has been that you cannot boil school performance down to one number. Yes, some schools are good at supporting English Language Learners. Yes, others are terrible at teaching math. But when you try to boil it down to one number, you lose the power of the data.
The point of the data is not to be punitive, but to be revelatory. It is there to help guide progress. Instead, boiling it down to one number will have several silly consequences.
First, and I cannot stress this enough, single digit ratings of schools are how segregation happens. That’s why Zillow is so deeply connected with Great Schools ratings. When you combine the idea of neighborhood boundaries with the idea of a school rating, you create an economic redline. That’s why realtors advertise houses in Silver Lake as being in the “Ivanhoe School District” (yes, they call it a school district). They know that Houses within the schools boundaries become more valuable. That in turn is going to gentrify any neighborhood proclaimed to have a “5”, forcing out families that are poorer.
Second, the proposed rating system is supposed to be based 45% on growth. Great, finally we are valuing growth! Oh joy! Except that when you make 45% of a 1 through 5 rating system based on growth, you are going to have WILD swings in scores from year to year. One year a school might have strong growth and be a 4, the next year it may have paltry growth and be a 2.
Furthermore, there is no well accepted way to calculate growth. The state explicitly says you cannot calculate growth between in the same student in two consecutive years. Instead, they say the best thing is something called DF3, but that has its problems too.
Finally, we already have a sophisticated rating system that does not use single digits! The California School Dashboard is the rating system that the state created – and it is actually pretty good. Yes, it’s a lot of information, but it is way more actionable than a single digit. It breaks down performance by individual subgroups, so you can know if a school is equitable.
You want to build successful schools? Then take a growth mindset approach – we all have areas for growth. What kind of complacency are you developing when you give a school a ranking of 5? And what kind of hierarchical malaise are you heaping upon a school with a 1?
I think that in the past, I too have fallen into this trap. I love the simplicity that a single digit provides. I have written several posts where I did just that.
But my daughter is about to start Kindergarten, and as I speak with parents of kids her age, they wax rhapsodic about so-and-so school that has a Great Schools ranking of 9 and how they wouldn’t ever send their kid to a school with a ranking below 7.
And as I listen to that, my heart sinks because the school I teach at has a Great Schools ranking of 5 and we do awesome things for students. But all that hard work is lost in that number that is deeply a product of social and economic injustice. Yes we have a lot of work to do to improve, yes we don’t always succeed. But boiling our school down to a single number isn’t informative to parents – it is deceptive.
When I said “I quit” before, I meant it. I am done with this website project of mine. I am shutting SchoolDataNerd down effective October 1. Mostly because I just can’t afford it (in personal time or in website maintenance cost).
But also because I think I have changed. I have become more skeptical of the way that data is narrowed. The way we talk about data in education is just to justify our pre-existing outlook – just look at the twitter accounts of or (don’t actually look at them, they are ideologues who abuse numbers to justify their extreme beliefs).
Transferring that to our students would probably be the worst possible lesson.