The Kelli Stargel curve is profound in what it reveals about how people of power view accountability -- in education, in Florida, and in America. Any education "white paper" should start there.
Billy -- I love you and I love your work, and almost every time I read what you've written I nod furiously, but I think your grading scale comparison misses the point. There are all kinds of different scales for rating different things. A "passing" score for brake pads manufactured to spec is not going to be 90%. How reasonable a grading system is depends entirely on what you are trying to accomplish. I assume, since you say the district grade you are talking about is an average of the "school grade points" that each school gets, that what that number amounts to is an aggregation at the district level of the complicated system that brings together something like 25 different values to determine a particular school's grade (including growth in English and Math, growth in the lowest 20th percentile, graduation rate, etc). Rating this on a scale is really difficult, because these measures are so different. I mean, achieving growth in low-performing students is really hard, and a teacher who can bring that about in 60% of her students that meet that criteria is a rock star.
The real problem is not that leaders get let off too easy, as you are suggesting, but that the scale for the leadership recognizes that education to the standard that our society pursues is really hard, and that not every student is going to have the ability to meet that standard, and that this is out of people's control to a large degree, but this actually might be the only aspect of our current educational system that acknowledges that reality. The problem is that recognizing that different people have different abilities has been stigmatized and deemed, "The soft bigotry of low expectations" (hmm.. wasn't it a Bush who said that?), and so creating a more humane system to evaluate student learning becomes a non-starter. Of course, the standard the leaders apply to themselves is going to be more friendly toward that reality because the consequences touch them directly.
The lesson to draw here though is not, in my opinion, how unfair it is that the leaders get a looser standard, but that we need to take the implications of that standard they have chosen for themselves and use those to re-thing the outcomes we are seeking all the way down the line.
Billy -- I love you and I love your work, and almost every time I read what you've written I nod furiously, but I think your grading scale comparison misses the point. There are all kinds of different scales for rating different things. A "passing" score for brake pads manufactured to spec is not going to be 90%. How reasonable a grading system is depends entirely on what you are trying to accomplish. I assume, since you say the district grade you are talking about is an average of the "school grade points" that each school gets, that what that number amounts to is an aggregation at the district level of the complicated system that brings together something like 25 different values to determine a particular school's grade (including growth in English and Math, growth in the lowest 20th percentile, graduation rate, etc). Rating this on a scale is really difficult, because these measures are so different. I mean, achieving growth in low-performing students is really hard, and a teacher who can bring that about in 60% of her students that meet that criteria is a rock star.
The real problem is not that leaders get let off too easy, as you are suggesting, but that the scale for the leadership recognizes that education to the standard that our society pursues is really hard, and that not every student is going to have the ability to meet that standard, and that this is out of people's control to a large degree, but this actually might be the only aspect of our current educational system that acknowledges that reality. The problem is that recognizing that different people have different abilities has been stigmatized and deemed, "The soft bigotry of low expectations" (hmm.. wasn't it a Bush who said that?), and so creating a more humane system to evaluate student learning becomes a non-starter. Of course, the standard the leaders apply to themselves is going to be more friendly toward that reality because the consequences touch them directly.
The lesson to draw here though is not, in my opinion, how unfair it is that the leaders get a looser standard, but that we need to take the implications of that standard they have chosen for themselves and use those to re-thing the outcomes we are seeking all the way down the line.