A-F Made Simple: How to Make Every School a Failing School
My yoga instructor at YogaQuest often says, “Simple is the new hard,” or something to that effect. I don’t know what that means, but it makes sense in the middle of Standing Bow-pulling Pose. Often, things may sound logical on the surface, but if we think about it, it doesn’t make sense at all. Oklahoma State Representative John Waldron, a former history teacher with many years’ experience in the public school system, sent me this simple explanation of how it’s possible that every public school could become a failing school, thus opening the door for privatization without accountability.
The Table Leg
By Rep. John Waldron
Let’s imagine you have an uneven table. One of the legs is too short. So you saw down the other legs. But you saw them too much, and now it’s too long. You keep adjusting, and adjusting, until the table has no legs.
We’re doing that to our school districts.
Under our A-F school report cards, we evaluate our districts on a bell curve. The bottom 5% are placed in a special category. They receive additional federal funds to help them improve. Many, if not most of them, are in that category because student populations have high levels of poverty, experience above-average levels of adverse childhood experiences or are English language learners. With State Superintendent Ryan Walter’s scowling about reading scores, for example, has he considered the challenges of getting an 8-year-old to pass a reading test in their second language, when their parents might not even be reading to them at home?
But just as with the table leg, our impulse is to saw away. It’s destructive. Recently OKCPS (Oklahoma City Public Schools) closed schools on its remediation list and moved students, knowing that the remediation label would not follow the students to their new schools. That “fixed” OKCPS for a time, but also meant that TPS (Tulsa Public Schools) now has a proportionately larger share of “failing” schools. Superintendent Walters built on this in his attacks on TPS, exaggerating the data to portray TPS — wrongly — as a failing district. He threatened punitive action — up to a state takeover or de-accreditation.
That might solve the problem, in his mind. No district, no problem, right? But remember — our A-F bell curve means SOMEONE IS ALWAYS AT BOTTOM. So what do we do? I guess we keep on sawing away the table legs. We can close down or take over more poor and underperforming schools, even though the federal guidelines tell us to support them with more resources. Eventually, we’ll find ourselves in a place where there’s only one public school district left, and it is simultaneously at the top and the bottom. So what do we do? Close it down! It was “failing,” after all.
Don’t worry, though. By then I’m sure the superintendent will have a nice network of Hillsdale-affiliated, publicly funded private Christian schools ready for our kids. Or at least, ready for those students they choose to take in. That will end the process because we don’t hold private schools accountable to any evaluation system.
See how it works?
