THE OHIO General Assembly labored, not mightily, and brought forth its report on its Report Card Committee this week.
The committee that did the report was immediately attacked by its two Toledo representatives, state Sen. Teresa Fedor and state Rep. Lisa Sobecki, as failing to do its job, as spelled out when the report was ordered in July.
Representative Sobecki gave an apt comparison.
“Students are taking finals right now. If you didn’t complete your final, you have a poor grade. Your commander in chief gives you a task. If you don’t complete your task, you put your troops in harm’s way,” Ms. Sobecki said.
She’s been on a school board and she’s been in the military, so she knows how both of those things work.
Ms. Sobecki and Ms. Fedor are the only two elected Democrats who were appointed to the committee that was supposed to make some recommendations about the state’s annual school report cards.
They pointed out that the committee was created by a vote of the General Assembly as part of the annual budget bill, with specific deliverables.
The committee was supposed to issue recommendations for what to do with Ohio’s haphazard, complicated, erroneous, misleading, and detrimental report card formula.
Did the committee do that? No.
It did distribute a report, summarizing in the sparsest of ways the recommendations that were submitted to the committee by various education interest groups. Those interest groups are the Buckeye Association of School Administrators, the State Board of Education, the Ohio Education Association, the Ohio Federation of Teachers, the Alliance for High Quality Education, Ohio Excels, the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, the Ohio Association for Gifted Children, and the Ohio School Boards Association Urban Network Report Card Work Group.
No parental organizations. No PTA or PTO. The law establishing the committee specifically asked for parental input.
In the end, most of the groups agreed that the report card should do away with the A-F letter grades.
And it appears that the Republican leader of one of the House committees is leaning that way too.
House Education committee chair Don Jones was quoted by the Ohio Statehouse News Bureau as saying that there’s a consensus to do away with the A-F letter grade system.
Instead, the state might replace the letter grades with labels such as “exceeding standards,” “meeting standards,” or “not meeting standards.”
The Ohio Department of Education has been publishing district report cards since 1998, changing to letter grades in 2012.
The grading system is a complex formula based on many factors, including the alignment of the planets. Not really. The alignment of the planets is a reliable indicator compared with some of the metrics used in the report cards.
The bottom line, though, is the grades depend on the performance of children in school, so schools and school districts are being categorized as “failing” or “excellent” based on how well the children do in tests. This is not fair to the teachers and staff in the F schools, and it gives too much credit to the teachers and staff in the A schools.
If the district has a lot of low-income families struggling to keep home and hearth together and for whom success in the classroom is not a high priority, then the district is going to get a low grade.
Here in metro Toledo, only Ottawa Hills got an A rating for the 2018-2019 school year. Does that sound right to people in Sylvania, Perrysburg, Maumee, Oregon, and Anthony Wayne? Do you agree Ottawa Hills is a better school district than yours? Well, the people in Toledo don’t feel that way either, but that’s how the General Assembly has deemed things to be.
Ms. Sobecki and Ms. Fedor believe that the letter grade system is intentionally punitive to grease the skids for more expansion of school choice vouchers to pay for private education.
There are legitimate reasons to support vouchers, or “EdChoice.” But it’s not necessary to get there by demeaning the efforts and accomplishments of the six large urban school districts in Ohio, all of which received a D grade on the most recent report card. Politically, they’re all D — for Democrat — as well.
As a school board member, Ms. Sobecki said she was stopped by students, parents, or teachers who said to her something like, “my school is already F-rated, why should I try?”
The General Assembly’s study committee turned in the test without answering that question.
Tom Troy is an associate editor of The Blade and a member of The Blade’s editorial board.
First Published December 20, 2019, 5:00 a.m.
