Grade Deflation?
September 30th, 2010
The era of the almost automatic A for city schools seems to have ended.
The Department of Education released its progress reports (a.k.a. school report cards) for city elementary and middle schools this year, and the grades, while still high, represented a sharp drop from last year.
In the latest accounting, 25 percent of the schools got A’s and 35 percent B’s — a distribution somewhat preordained by a curve. Only 1 percent failed. While 750 schools saw their grades drop, only 22 improved.
Last year the department came in for widespread derision when it declared that 84 percent of all schools had earned A’s. Following that, the city said it would change its methodology this year and pledged to “raise the bar.” As part of that it has established a grading curve so only 25 percent of school could get As.
When the state announced this summer that it was altering the scale for grading standardized tests — fewer students would be marked as meeting standards — the city set a floor for how much any school could plummet on its report card from one year to the next. In other words, even though many more kids are considered to have failed the state tests, only a limited number of schools will flunk. (For more detail on how the scores are figured, see Gotham Schools.)
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