Governor Deal's ill-informed and arbitrary definition of failure

Governor Deal this week announced his plan to usurp local control of schools he deems failures, appropriating their facilities and materials with the option to turn them over to for-profit management companies. The initial hearing on this legislation took place without the distraction of having the legislation to review, but the governor's office did afterward release the list of persistently failing schools. To the surprise of no one with experience in education, one common thread is immediately apparent: high poverty schools must work very hard to achieve gains in student performance.

In their zeal to come up with some kind of objective measure of failure (CCRPI scores below 60 for three consecutive years), the Governor and his staff have done little more than to establish the correlation between poverty and lower CCRPI scores while obscuring the good work being done by some school systems and concealing weak efforts by others.

Jarod Apperson on his Grading Atlanta blog made this point with his analysis of the 2013 CCRPI scores [Bending the Curve: Why CCRPI Misleads Educators and Parents]. He highlights that there is a distinct downward trend relating increased poverty and lower CCRPI results, and he points out that some systems (Gwinnett) exceed expected performance, while others like DeKalb (on the list) and Cherokee (not on the list) underperform the expected trend. In his selections for his list of failing schools, the Governor makes no allowance for expected performance or the challenges faced by students from high poverty homes. It is expedient, but not the foundation for good policy.

Even more demeaning to educators in the classrooms is the willful disregard the governor shows to the outstanding efforts of some districts to improve their students' achievement. The CCRPI standards have been raised each year: to maintain a score over three years reflects improved effort and performance.  To actually show continued gains reflects tremendously effective work by a district. Colquitt County has realized gains of 8 and 15(!) points in CCRPI at their listed 100% poverty schools, but they share the same scarlet F as other schools. Scanning the list, other schools and districts stand out as making substantial progress, even with the progressively more rigorous CCRPI standards. But those achievements are disregarded, leaving the schools still subject to takeover.

Governor Deal has put forward his list of "failing" schools as a justification for turning over more of the state's schools to charter operators. The list does more to show the challenges of teaching in high-poverty areas and to reveal the tenacity of some districts and schools who are finding greater success each year. The state would be better served by a less simplistic definition of "failure" and by finding and emulating those public schools who are achieving despite daunting challenges.