EDITORIALS

Who you gonna believe?

The stats or your lyin’ eyes?

— TODAY we come to praise Arkansas schools. They are among the tops in the nation! Our kids are learning, teachers are succeeding, and education is happening.

Or not.

If you’re confused about how our schools are doing these days, join the crowded club. Just last Tuesday, on Page One, your statewide newspaper reported that only 35 of the state’s 239 school districts could be labeled as Achieving. The other 200-plus districts couldn’t be. Achieving, that is.

Two days later, again on Page One, your statewide newspaper reported that Arkansas’ public schools ranked 5th in the nation for the second-consecutive year, according to one of those national report cards.

So which is it? We suspect somewhere in between. Neither of these reports suggests that those who did the grading are, well, using their noggins, as one of our teachers used to say.

LET’S tackle Tuesday’s report first. Only a fraction of the public schools in Arkansas-35 out of 239, or about 15 percent-could be labeled Achieving under the state’s new accountability system.

So we were told. But the new system is as confusing as any other official report written in officialese. Principals, teachers and, no doubt, parents and students were left scratching their own noggins. Especially when low-performing schools were called Achieving, and some of the best ones were not.

Huh?

Maybe this can explain it: Good schools are being punished. For past success.

It works like this, or rather doesn’t work: Each school is supposed to make progress toward getting 100 percent of its students Proficient in the classroom. And the state has set up guidelines for each school depending on where it was in 2011. If a school has done such a good job that 90 percent of its kids were proficient in 2011, but it doesn’t make much progress toward 100 percent, then the principal and school board members are going to have to explain why their school isn’t doing so well. Officially, that is.

But a school with a terrible record-let’s say one that didn’t have even 10 percent of its kids meeting minimal standards in 2011-would be considered doing a good job, or at least an Achieving job, if it were to double, triple or quadruple that rate. And yet still fail most of its students.

To quote one (understandably) frustrated superintendent: “It is a little bothersome and hard to explain to a group of teachers when their students scored 85 percent in literacy when the target was 87.” You think that’s hard? Try explaining it to the parents.

Not only are principals at good schools having to explain why the numbers are skewed, principals at awful schools aren’t.

Up is down. Down is up.

Welcome to public education today.

THEN CAME Thursday morning, and your statewide paper appeared on your doorstep again. (Thank you, Circulation!) The headline said Arkansas’ public schools ranked fifth in the nation.

Our schools got a B-minus in the annual Quality Counts report card that’s published every year by Education Week.

This when the state of Arkansas says most of its schools aren’t up to snuff?

Yes. Depending on what you measure.

The outfit putting out the report card said the state excelled in how high it set its standards, the accountability of its schools, and in foggy categories like Transitions and Alignment with the teaching profession and how schools connect with the work force. It all sounded like a foreign language to us, and it is. Call it educanto. What, no category measuring the paradigm shift to impact the synergy of schools to leverage key learnings?

As far as a real measurement went, the report card said Arkansas got a D in the area of student achievement.

Huh again?

Thumbs up to the state’s Education Commissioner, Tom Kimbrell, who pointed out that the state still has far to go when it gets a D on student achievement. He sounded more realistic than our politicos, including the governor, who were patting themselves on the back after this “expert” analysis came out.

The moral of the story: The numbers can’t be trusted. Not when they’re spun so hard that anybody focusing on them would get dizzy. But that may be how those running education like it. The more confused the citizenry, the less accountability.

ONE MORE question. Let’s put it in a now-forgotten tongue called plain English:

Just when is the state going to start grading school districts, individual schools and maybe even classroom teachers with an A, B, C, D or F? You know, the way the schools grade the kids. Maybe some still-awake legislator will sponsor a bill to do just that this session. That is, if he doesn’t mind a fight with the teachers’ unions.

Ah, great schools, bad schools.

Wonderful grades, failing grades.

When it comes to education, there seem to be real measurements and unreal ones. It may have been Mark Twain who said there were lies, damned lies and statistics. In education, there are measurements, pretend measurements, and official reports.

COULD we please talk about the essence of the problem? Plainly. It’s this: We’re never going to fix education in this country if we don’t fix the way we educate our teachers. And we don’t mean by just rolling them through those cookie-cutter Education Departments so they come out certified but not educated. What’s needed now, as always, is education, not job training.

Our priorities are confused. First should come education, a real education in the liberal arts and sciences, and only then the trade school. That’s the way the best liberal arts colleges do it. Every teacher needs a sound, general, demanding education before being allowed to take the first course in teaching techniques.

When that happens, if that ever happens, we’d start getting educated teachers in classrooms. And then watch the scores of their charges improve. See what happened with Teach America. That program starts with educated young people and only then subjects them to teacher training. What happens is change-for the better. A real education will do that.

Editorial, Pages 10 on 01/14/2013

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