By Victor Skinner
EAGnews.org

OKLAHOMA CITY – Local school superintendents and the state’s teachers union are pushing to review Oklahoma’s evaluation system for public schools because they think the A-F system is unfair.

The majority of public school districts have chosen not to disclose the grades they received from the state until the State Board of Education certifies the scores later this month. In the meantime, superintendents and union leaders are bellyaching over how the grades were derived, particularly how the state determines student growth, the Oklahoma Gazette reports.

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“We want something that’s easy to understand,” Linda Hampton, president of the Oklahoma Education Association, told the Gazette.

We fail to see how an A through F grading system could be much simpler.

We believe the union’s real concern is that parents may soon be able to distinguish poorly performing schools from good ones, and will not want to send their children to a failing school. That could mean a loss of students in some failing schools, leading to a loss of teaching jobs and a loss of dues revenue for the union.

“We need ways to improve, not label,” Hampton said. “Having a label as an F school is quite a stigma. How do we recruit and retain teachers for these failing schools? You don’t, because they are going to look elsewhere.”

While Hampton may not have much faith in her members’ desire to improve the state’s worst schools, Oklahoma schools superintendent Janet Barresi believes, as we do, that teachers in poor performing schools will “accept the challenge” to step up their game when they realize students aren’t learning as well as they should.

And we suspect that parents and taxpayers are far less concerned with the stigma that comes with “F” or “D” grades for schools as they are the lifelong stigma that haunts students who are cheated out of a proper education.

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If the state isn’t honest about the performance of its schools, how can it expect to identify the ones that need improvement and give them the help they require to get back on track?

The question about the fairness of the grading system is also irrelevant. Every school in the state is subject to the same criteria and measurements used to issue the grades.

State officials should remain open-minded about ways they can improve the grading system, and implement changes that make sense in terms of identifying how well schools are serving students. But they shouldn’t allow objections from the public school establishment to prevent them from sharing their results with the public.

Parents deserve to have all the available information they need to make smart choices about their children’s education, and a general grade is a good place to start.