When it comes to school report cards, the city isn’t making the grade.
Education officials use a system to grade each school that changes wildly each year, doling out poor grades to some facilities that don’t deserve it, Comptroller John Liu charged in a new audit yesterday.
The grades — from A to F — can greatly impact which schools get financial aid and which ones close.
Liu’s study focused on 10 randomly selected high schools throughout the five boroughs from the 2006-07 school year to the 2009-10 year.
They found one example of a high school slated for closure in 2014 – Metropolitan Corporate Academy in Brooklyn – that would have shown improvement had the standards remained uniform each year.
That school got a D in the 2008-09 school year, down from a C the previous two years, but would have earned a B if the 2006-07 grading system had not changed, the audit found.
Liu would not go so far as to suggest the high school would not be slated for closure had the standards for grading been steady over the years.
But he says the DOE has repeatedly changed the value it gives to different types of diplomas, such as Regents, Advanced Regents and GEDs, in a school’s overall grade.
The DOE begged to differ with Liu’s findings.
Progress reports are "a one-year snapshot that is designed to compare schools based on their performance and progress during that school year. The department has not made claims of comparability in methodology across years," the agency said in a statement.
Can't way to see how well things work when they take this same convoluted kind of system with shifting criteria and apply it to teacher evaluations every year, then fire teachers who are not deemed "effective," as Governor Cuomo wants to, after one year.
I'm sure it will work as well as the school report card system.
Here's Liu's news release.
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