Open Letter to Stephen Pruitt

From Gay Adelmann, Dear JCPS Co-Founder

Dear Commissioner Pruitt,

I am glad to hear you say that new accountability system should not involve ranking schools.

But if a metric exists, how can we help BUT rank our schools? We can’t help ourselves. Everyone seems to feel their child must get into the “best” school or it’s the end of the world. And since we are a district of choice, we have the option of trying to get into the best schools in our cluster, and in some cases, the entire district. And those who score well on the test “miraculously” get into the schools with the history of the highest test scores. This “crabs in a bucket” approach creates huge disparities between the “best” schools and the “worst” schools. I would like to suggest that we put better parameters in place so that one school doesn’t have huge advantages over another. Everyone needs to take on their share of the “village”. This is Kentucky. I think we know a thing or two about making a fair horse race. Currently, the fillies and the thoroughbreds are held to the same standards. Make the race fair or change the standards, but don’t do both.

The current configuration pits not just districts, but it pits schools against each other, labels students and incorrectly evaluates teachers. This creates competition instead of collaboration, ties up funds and classroom resources, pre-empting art, music, and badly needed wraparound services, saps the love of learning from the children, creates an even greater burden on our most vulnerable populations, causes educational gaps to widen, which leads to decreased teacher morale, increased teacher turnover, increased student behavior problems, increased number of families exiting JCPS, and even leads to excessive test prep and yes, in some cases, cheating. We can’t help ourselves.

Don’t get me wrong. We are not opposed to tests. We just want them to be teacher-led, authentic and used to guide instruction. None of which the high-stakes, standardized tests are. The questions our students missed are not provided in order for them to have the opportunity to learn from them. The scores are not received until October of the following school year, which is too late to plan any corrective course of action.

Whatever accountability measures we come up with, it needs to ONLY be about the kids. And we all know that the test doesn’t measure important characteristics such as innovation, leadership, creativity, talent, I could go on and on. Like a fit bit that only measures steps, it doesn’t tell me if I’m fit. I might be a weight lifter, which is not tracked on a fit bit. But I would still be fit.

Federal law still requires that schools that are struggling be identified. Since wealth is the greatest predictor of test scores, the first way to identify a struggling school would be to look at the average income, parents’ education attainment and zip code of students in the school. Not drown the child with excessive tests that do more harm than good, especially to students in high poverty, high needs, high trauma situations. They end up taking more tests, test prep and remediation than the average student. Which means they get less of the services and instruction they truly need, much less none of the art, music, or play that simply make learning enjoyable. They become disengaged, disruptive, or worse. Come test time, they have figured out that the scores mean nothing to them, so they don’t even try. You have an entire population of students who have “opted out” of high stakes tests. They just didn’t know that’s what it was called.

Suggestion: Try testing students in 3rd and 8th grade, and again in high school. Not every grade. Not every year. You’ll get trendlines about the school’s improvement by comparing classes year over year.  You don’t need to take all of the blood from a patient to tell if they are well. And a thermometer never made anyone well. Especially not a broken thermometer. Furthermore, schools can be focused on and rewarded for competing with their previous numbers, not an advantage school across town. Imagine my motivation if every day my fitbit told me how poorly I was doing because I wasn’t as good as the younger, slimmer, more active users.

You want accountability? Great, what do you use in your private schools where many of your own children attend to determine if a teacher/program is working, if a child is learning? You want to impose something on us that you don’t use for your own children. Well, we don’t want it either.

My husband is in new product development for a local appliance manufacturing firm. His latest project is a pizza oven. Imagine if his boss said to him, “you have one metric that the pizzas that come out of this oven will be measured by:  Temperature.” Do you think he would use the finest ingredients? Or do you think he might skimp on sauce, cheese? Do you think he would take it out when the crust had turned the perfect shade of brown? Heck no. He’d leave that pie in until it was burned and possibly on fire. Because what gets measured, gets done. We are cutting out anything that is not part of the test and then ride these kids like a jockey rides that thoroughbred. And it’s magnified in a district like ours because of our district of choice and the competition between schools that that environment creates.

You have a rule that PLA schools must get out of the bottom 5 % to exit PLA status. Even if the reason the school is lower performing is because they serve a high needs population. Really? Plus, there will always be a bottom 5%, so that metric is useless if everyone is improving. Instead of collaboration among schools, we end up having to root for another school to fall because that is the only way we can rise in the rankings. We’re like crabs in a bucket.