Coming Soon to an Excellent School Near You;
a Misleading and Harmful "Growth" Label

Coming Soon to an Excellent School Near You
a Misleading and Harmful Growth Label

 

            Louisiana schools are continuing to improve, a fact that all Louisianians celebrate.  Government officials are to be congratulated for mandating and devising the accountability system that undoubtedly has precipitated the statewide surge in school performance. 

 

Following Louisiana s precedent, the No-Child-Left-Behind Act established a supplementary structure that may be helping to effect the happy outcome.  Practicing educators realize, however, that an integral part of the combined system is critically flawed.  It s now time for the general public to understand the truth and consequences of that defect, too, so that they can join the call to correct it.

 

            Let s look at nature.  Between birth and death, nature s sequence of stages is growth, maturity, and decline with maturity being longest and most productive of the three.  Louisiana s school accountability system labels both schools of academic growth and schools in academic decline, but ignores the most important stage in which a school can operate academic maturity.  During this extended period of its life, the school is functioning as close to its maximum potential as possible.  Inevitably there are minor fluctuations in the school s performance, but achievement remains very near its highest level.  At no time during the period of academic maturity can the school be seriously considered anything but outstanding.

 

            However, according to the current accountability system, any deviation whatsoever from a mature school s highest performance earns the school a misleading negative label of no growth or school in decline.   In fact a school could easily go from exemplary academic growth to decline in just one year.  Furthermore, every excellent school is bound to receive a negative label sooner or later, and the more nearly a school approaches its maximum potential, the sooner the school must suffer the misrepresentation crisis.  Some victims, in fact, are already appearing.            

 

What could be more unnatural, illogical, misleading, unfair or downright insulting?  After all, we don t expect a tree to grow through the sky.  We don t require a five-star hotel to improve the quality of its service every year.  We don t slap a deficiency label on a farming operation that uses only the best agricultural practices year after year when its crop yield dips one season.  Why should Louisiana s schools be so rigidly held to so irrational a standard, and why should they be humiliated with false indications of shortcoming?

 

            The worst of this mess is this.  Unjustly assigning an uncomplimentary label to a school adds injury to insult.  Students, teachers, and administrators keep a mature school excellent.  Can anything be more demoralizing to them than to reflect negatively on their hard work and success?   What s more, the community that an academically mature school serves contributes back to the quality of the school.  Few things can be more depressing to the community s real estate market than the school s having to bear some negative label.  There goes the neighborhood, there goes the neighborhood s support of the school, and there goes the school s quality. 

 

A mature school s overall performance each year and the more telling performance of each of the various demographic groups within the school should guarantee the school a complimentary and supportive growth label.  Right now the system guarantees just the opposite, and our fine schools are hurting from it.  Government officials, stop this insanity.

 

James R. Rogers
Mathematics Teacher
Neville High School
Monroe, Louisiana

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