INDIANOLA — Imagine your son coming home from school with an F in Algebra II.
“But, Dad,” he says, “I’m not really failing. I passed Algebra I last year, and since Algebra II is harder, my teacher is letting me keep my grade from Algebra I.”
Or the CEO of a corporation telling investors: “Guys, I know you’re upset because profits fell 50 percent, but I’ve got a plan: We’re going to report last year’s profits on financial documents because we faced stronger competition this year that made it harder to make money.”
Those examples show a ridiculous detachment from reality that would probably earn both offending parties a swift blow to the backside, either proverbially or literally.
But it’s exactly what federal education officials are letting the Mississippi Department of Education do.
The state received a federal waiver to allow schools whose state rating fell in 2014 to claim 2013’s score. Why? Because the state is implementing the tougher Common Core standards, and it figures schools need a grace period to adjust.
That doesn’t make much sense. Schools have been gradually beginning to teach the new standards since 2010, but the 2013 and 2014 results are both based on the same exam, the MCT2. Students won’t start taking the Common Core-based MCT3 until May 2015.
The only real reason for intentionally misstating results is to make communities think their schools are better than they really are.
In fairness, our state has slowly been inching toward reality with its school ratings for some time. And I can see why education leaders don’t want to paint the full picture all at once: Many conservatives don’t care much about public education — especially in the majority black districts — and would relish having an excuse to undercut it.
I don’t want to see that happen. But I do want to be told the truth.
It’s increasingly difficult to trust the test results as administrators and the state Department of Education have big incentives to paint a rosy picture — and have shown little interest in pursuing cheating allegations that the media have turned up.
If not outright cheating, districts use smoke and mirrors to make things appear better than they are. For example, the Holmes County superintendent admitted to The Clarion-Ledger newspaper that a high school in his district jumped from an F to an A in one year because he “cherry-picked” only the best students to take the assessments. Wouldn’t a baseball manager love to send only his four best hitters up to the plate over and over again instead of cycling through all nine?
In Sunflower County, Ruleville Middle School is rated an A, but Ruleville Central High School is rated an F (without the waiver). It doesn’t compute that a truly top-rated middle school would produce students who suddenly begin to fail once reaching high school. Something’s awry with the rating system.
Under the current model, only one district was rated as an F, Hinds County AHS. It stretches the imagination to think that only one district is failing — using that word’s everyday meaning — in a state where one in four students doesn’t graduate in four years and which is perennially at the bottom of national education measures.
The new, more rigorous tests are expected to make the ratings fall lower next year. The state, not surprisingly, has applied for another waiver to soften the blow.
That’s nonsense.
The sooner education leaders face the truth, the sooner something can do done.
Of course, the sooner the public and the Legislature receive a fully accurate picture of school performance, the sooner they might start calling for true reform that could cost some jobs among the bureaucracy. And preventing that from happening seems to be the thrust of our current system.
