In suburban NY, school report cards are impacting school board races:
Armed with facts and figures culled from the voluminous, data-rich report cards, a group of parents is endorsing candidates who support their push for a more back-to-basics approach...
Typically, anxiety over report card scores has been highest in New York City suburbs, Ernst said, where housing prices, frequently linked to the reputation of local schools, are astronomical. They've also been of concern in poor, urban school districts whose officials frequently say that if they have lower scores, they are reflection of the poverty rates in their communities.
Since its inception in 1997, release of New York's annual Report Card on the Schools has become a spring ritual, with students, teachers, administrators, real estate agents and, last but not least, parents, waiting eagerly for the scores...
Parents and students can use the results to compare their school with others across town, across the county, or clear across the state.
In Guilderland, the report card scores are fueling the latest incarnation of the perennial reading wars, which have raged for more than a decade. The issue has also spilled over into the board race in which five candidates are competing for three seats on a nine-member board. Three candidates are being backed by a group that is using report card scores to pick apart the district's elementary school reading program.
"You don't know if you are good or bad unless you have a point of comparison," said Melissa Mirabile, who heads a group of Guilderland parents who want the district to adopt a more structured reading program in the early grades.
Ms. Mirabile is a stockbrocker who waded through the data on the report card and didn't like what she found:
"The numbers started to jump out at me," she said. Among her findings: between 1999 and 2002, the percentage of students in the top of four scoring levels dropped from 30 to 25 percent. Statewide, it rose from 16 to 21 percent.
Broken out by school, the situation is even more stark, she contends.
Ms. Mirabile's response was to organize a pro-phonics parental group to endorse the election of three school board candidates who support that approach. My only question is - this is news? I mean, is this the first and only area in which parents have been perusing the accountability data and using that information to drive school board elections? If so, that's a shame.
Posted by kswygert at May 17, 2004 02:01 PM