While Quakertown Community School District wrestles with providing students with laptop computers, it might as well also distribute Hula Hoops, Mood Rings, and Silly Bands. What better way to acknowledge that our administration simply loves fads.
Just when the long-term damage of Integrated Math is subsiding, we are again setting up our kids, and families, for failure by making them guinea pigs in yet another experimental, controversial curriculum.
For the past six years, and without consulting the community or school board, the QCSD administration has been phasing in Standards Based Grading, which substitutes a four-point system, and accompanying explanations, for the usual 100-point scale. This is apparently in response to our difficulty in meeting the requirements of the No Child Left Behind law, which forces school districts to supposedly assess student achievement more uniformly. (For a more detailed explanation, see my column of January 15, 2009, in the Archives).
With a looming 2014 deadline for 100 percent student "success", QCSD had to do something. If we continued to rely on our horrendous PSSA results, we would, in all likelihood, lose our government funding, since about one-third of 11th graders are failing the math section every year, and about one-quarter failing reading. So instead of better educating the kids, we are changing the way they are graded! Superintendent Dr Lisa Andrejko is counting on the feds, and Harrisburg, accepting SBG as an official measure of "success", because then our teachers - and administration - would control all NCLB compliance, whereas they have no control over PSSA's.
That would allow for the continuation of miracles in QCHS. Currently, those kids who can't read and write to the 11th grade PSSA state minimum are somehow miraculously transformed in their senior year, and graduate! In the future, our deception won't need to be so obvious. With SBG, we can control the grading/evaluation all along, so by the time students hit their senior year, they are already NCLB-approved.
Not necessarily any better educated, just with better grades. What a great system. We can fool the feds, and we can even fool the district's families into thinking that our kids are performing as they should be. But can we fool the colleges and universities? We couldn't with IM. They will be expecting QCHS graduates to demonstrate the same level and depth of knowledge as kids from those districts which still use time-tested educational basics, not the latest fad.
Meanwhile, those QCSD families with "smart" kids have learned, much to their chagrin, that the new system works against them. It is basically designed to facilitate NCLB-acceptable mediocrity. Students find it much harder to get a 4 (an A), with the cutoff at about 94. But the next grade, a 3 (B) has far too wide a range, about 75 to 94. Traditionally, this would be mid-C to mid-A work, but it is now all lumped together as a B (and "passing" for NCLB purposes).
As a result, many students who work their little butts off, and achieve what used to be an A (and is still an A in most other schools), now get a B. And since homework and class participation no longer count, and tests can be retaken endlessly, those hard workers get the same grade as the lazy kids who don't do homework, retake tests, and slide by with a 75. The scientific term for that is "disincentive". And those hard workers, with their B's, must compete for college placements with all of those kids from the thousands of districts where the same result yields an A (plus those lazy kids with the same B's).
The QCHS Honor Roll tells the whole story. When the Class of 2010, which just graduated, was 10 th graders in 2007-08 (with traditional teaching), they averaged 142 students on the Honor Roll each marking period. That increased to 151 when they were juniors. But as seniors, with a full year of SBG, the figure plummeted to 98. Ditto for this year's junior class. Last year, as (traditional) sophomores, they averaged 171 honorees per marking period. This year in was 109.
The numbers are even worse if you compare classes over the past five years. Average Honor Roll for 10 th graders since 2005-06 was 170, 179, 142, 171, and - this year - 71. 11 th grade: 208, 195, 182, 151, and now 109. 12 th grade: 152, 191, 157, 185, and 98. IQ's didn't suddenly drop. Our kids are just the victims of a system designed to cater to those at the bottom, at the expense of those at the top.
FYI, don't look for those Honor Roll stats on the district's Pollyanna website. It took a Right-To-Know request, and a 30-day district extension, to pry the info loose. And it didn't include the final marking period for this year.
In January, 2009, I participated in one of the district's poorly-attended workshops to "introduce" the community to SBG (although the district's website claims that it has been in use here since 2004). I wrote that the administration was (rightfully) stressing that the new system was a work in progress. The main difficulty - and there are surely many - was, and still is, that SBG is very, very, very dependent on the individual teachers. Standards Based Education requires that the instructor understand, and accurately report, every child's strengths and weaknesses in every subject, as well as a wide range of habits and characteristics. A great theory, but rather unrealistic, especially since it involves retraining the entire staff. Some - perhaps many - of our union-tenured teachers just aren't up to it, but can't be replaced. If you want uniform grading, you have to have uniform instruction, and uniform methods of evaluation, not to mention a uniform understanding of the entire process. After six years in QCSD, that still doesn't exist.
That is why SBG, like its long-discredited forerunners, Mastery Learning, and Objective Based Education, has never succeeded anywhere, despite misguided attempts by states and school districts to require it (can you say "Integrated Math"?). QCSD isn't alone in Hula-Hooping.
There is such dissatisfaction in the community that the district arranged for a question-and-answer session for parents on June 29 with Thomas Guskey and Lee Ann Jung, two University of Kentucky professors who are leading SBG advocates. This was a bit of deja vu, conjuring up images of a few years ago, when students and families were so upset with IM. The district stacked a "task force" with IM advocates. No objective discussion, just a lot of promotion. It was disbanded after the shenanigans were exposed. And one has to wonder why we had to wait until after graduation to hold the SBG meeting, since the confusion and anger have been out there for years. Guskey, who has made praising SBG his life work, naturally called QCSD's efforts "outstanding" (he would not have been invited here to say otherwise), but he did concede that the district made "some mistakes along the way", and echoed the administration's theme from two years ago, that SBG is "a work in progress".
Guskey and Jung also repeated another administration mantra: it can take four or five years to fully implement the system (even though we are about to enter year seven). But what wasn't said is that the "four or five years" really is just a guess. We are basically guinea pigs for SBG, Guskey, and Jung, because, despite more than a decade of attempts, there is no school system in this country with the controversial system fully operational.
Talk of universities accepting SBG on equal footing with traditional education and grading is just a hope and a prayer, because SBG isn't functional enough yet for colleges to measure their incoming students' performances. If, like IM, students who graduate from the fad program struggle, we will have to start all over - again.
According to the Philadelphia Inquirer's Annual Report Card on the Schools, we are one of the lowest-performing districts in Eastern PA. By adopting an entirely new educational concept, our administration is saying, without saying, that despite one of the highest teacher salary scales in the state, and hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars thrown at the problem, they still have no idea how to properly, and effectively, educate our kids. But by jumping into something unknown that only they understand and control, which could take four or five more years - if ever - to fully implement, they can buy at least a few years on the job here.
And, unfortunately, it will take a when-its-too-late crisis like IM to wake everyone up. The admins will never admit that SBG is a mistake, because they are completely invested in it. So, again, the kids would suffer for our love of fads.