Our education system is being treated like a business.

Its CEO’s are Mayor Bloomberg and Chancellor Klein, neither of whom has any educational experience or background. Mayor Bloomberg is the founder of a financial services and news empire, and Chancellor Klein is a lawyer. Neither is qualified to run, let alone revamp the New York City Education system.

The New York City Department of Education (DOE) has recently released school “Progress Reports,” grading city schools with a letter grade from A through F. While the DOE may have had good intentions, its failure to follow standard procedure in creating this new system has resulted in an incomprehensible report bearing an ambiguous grade. The DOE failed to consult principals, teachers, parents, students, or even the New York State Education Department when they developed these reports. The NYC education system, instead, is being run as a business; the emphasis is on numbers and statistics and not on education. Rather than finding shortcomings in schools and then working on fixing these flaws, the DOE is instead cutting its losses, closing schools, and moving on, leaving students in the lurch. The purpose of a business is to create a product. The purpose of an institution like the DOE is to educate students, not to generate homogeneous products. Students cannot be treated like statistics; they need to be treated like humans so they act as such.

Mayor Bloomberg was quoted as saying “With these Progress Reports, parents no longer have to navigate a maze of statistics to determine how their child’s school is doing and how it compares to others.” Yet, the DOE released a 29 page packet explaining the high school version of the progress report. This packet attempts to explain just how the scores were calculated as well as the various weights attached to factors such as the three different surveys, test scores, and attendance. This is extremely confusing. For example, Student Performance is based primarily on test scores, but grades are also compared to a peer group consisting of the twenty schools ranked above and the twenty schools ranked below based on 8th grade test scores as well as poverty rate, percentage of black and Hispanic students, percentage of Special Education students, and more. Elements like class size, however, are conspicuously missing.

The Progress Reports are mainly based on a different category:Student Progress. 55% of the final grade is based on progress on standardized tests from one year to another. Progress is an important factor in determining the success of a school. However, when the majority of a grade is based on it, it has the potential to fail the top schools in the system. When a school starts with high test scores, there is nowhere left to go but down. A fatal flaw in the Progress Reports is that it will often grade its best schools among its worst.

In addition to this new Progress Report system, the federally mandated No Child Left Behind Act creates two different lists (state and federal) of schools with poor performance. There is also a state system called School Under Registration Review (SURR), which is essentially the state’s list of failing schools Throw in School Report Cards as well(not to be confused with the new Progress Reports).

The grades given by the city’s new Progress Reports conflict with the established standards already in place. For example, a downtown school that was the only NYC middle school to receive a No Child Left Behind Blue Ribbon for high test scores was given a D. Of the 25 schools labeled “persistently dangerous,” the 11 that received Progress Report grades got the following scores: two As, two Bs, five Cs, one D and one F. Of the 26 schools on the SURR list, nine received an A or a B, while only six received an F.

James Liebman, the DOE’s chief accountability officer and the architect of the progress reports testified before an unsympathetic City Council Education Committee in early December. He made frequent references to a Quinnipiac University poll which found support for the new system. However, not even 15% of those polled were parents of children attending public schools. When asked if the grades were mainly based on a single test, Liebman explained that for elementary school students, it was based on two tests. When further pressed, he replied “Life is one test” to the amusement of the council members and the disgust of the parents in the audience. He went on to say “it also has to do with surveys, it has to do with attendance.” At the end of the hearing, Liebman left through a side door, avoiding the director of Time Out From Testing, an advocacy group, as well as parents bearing a petition with almost 7,000 signatures protesting the new system.

While the DOE may have had the best of intentions when creating these progress reports, its main claims about them are wrong. The reports are still a “maze of statistics” and are incomprehensible to the average parent or student searching for information about their school. Yes, a single letter grade is easy to understand. But these grades often have little relationship to the success (or lack thereof) in a school. Additionally, a single grade cannot sum up everything about a school. A student’s report card gives them a grade in each class, not a single all encompassing letter. This letter barely takes into account the non-numerical aspects of a school: the environment, the teachers, etc. Even if the system were to work properly, it is intrinsically flawed in that it merely states a school’s problems, and offers no solutions. The DOE’s only response to a poor grade is to close the school or fire its principal or teachers. The Department of Education needs to take the resources they put into reporting schools’ failures and instead work to improve these schools.