Since I am quick to criticize the media for its role in the failures of the current education reform movement—such as PBS, The Charleston Post and Courier, and Education Week—I must also recognize when a media outlet provides much needed insight into education policy that has clearly run off the tracks, such as the so-called Florida miracle and the enduring practice of assigning letter grades to schools.
In “Low-income schools struggle under state’s grading system” (Miami Herald, August 10, 2013), Michael Vasquez and David Smiley offer a clear but disturbing picture of accountability in Florida:
With dozens of changes in just the past three years, the formula behind Florida’s A-to-F school grading system has been criticized as a confusing mess. But there’s been at least one constant in Miami-Dade and Broward results: The wealthiest schools never get Fs, and schools with high populations of poor students face an uphill battle to even get a C.
The trend is visible through a decade-plus of school grade results, dating back to the first grades issued in 1999.
Vasquez and Smiley, along with the Miami Herald, represent a needed aspect of journalism addressing education reform: Recognizing large and compelling patterns, and thus the consequences of education policy.
The analysis of assigning letter grades to schools in Florida exposes some important conclusions:
• Although high poverty rates don’t necessarily doom a school to a subpar grade, D and F schools are overwhelmingly serving students from poor neighborhoods, and the few schools that do overcome poverty to achieve an A are outliers. (There were nine such schools this year, all in Miami-Dade).
• Of the 209 schools in Miami-Dade and Broward with at least 90 percent of students receiving free or reduced lunch, 78 percent received a grade of C or worse. Roughly 39 percent of these high-poverty schools received a D or F.
• Of the 43 local schools with much lower poverty rates (30 percent or fewer students receiving free or reduced lunch), 86 percent received an A, and none received a D or F.
Despite efforts to identify educational quality among schools by focusing on growth models, data used in accountability policies remain primarily a reflection of out-of-school factors. Further, the schools that sit outside the typical patterns are rightfully identified by Vasquez and Smiley as “outliers.”
This analytical report on letter grades for schools in Florida is a strong example of quality journalism that seeks out and presents complex and detailed evidence, placing that data in the broader context of the many factors that impact not only the evidence we gather on our schools but also what conclusions we draw as well as how we draw those conclusions.
In the article, Miami-Dade Superintendent Alberto Carvalho explains, “‘Just as much as poverty can’t be an excuse, the exclusion of poverty as a factor is immoral.'”
Rare is the news article that allows a perspective this complex.
No Child Left Behind (NCLB) ushered in several grand promises in 2001, such as closing the achievement gap, but one of the central requirements of the legislation—the use of scientifically based research—is now poised to dismantle the entire accountability movement, including policies such as labeling schools with letter grades based primarily on test scores.
The evidence is clear that thirty years of accountability built on standards and high-stakes testing has failed. The next step is composing and sharing a unified message of that fact, while also building a coalition to reset the reform agenda so that we address poverty, equity, and opportunity in the lives of children and their families as well as in the schools those children attend.
dr. p.l. (paul) thomas 
It would be a step forward if we could abandon the term “reform agenda” as it is now so corrupted both in use and meaning. Your point about “complexity” is exactly it. The complex perspective invites and demands deep, cooperative thinking and does not permit the simplifications that have reduced it all to data points and allowed the takeover to go forward.
Thanks for bringing this article to our attention. As you so rightly point out, we do not see enough articles like this from the mass media. The article clearly indicates that the poverty of children attending a school has an impact on how the school is rated based on test scores. To me, it is also a reminder that it is harder to engage children who live in poverty — they come to school hungry or they have not slept, or the disturbances of their home life carries over into their experiences of classmates and teachers. These children are not stupid, they can learn, and learn a lot from the world around them. But if they are to develop their academic smarts we need to create warm, accepting, safe, schools, that give them lots of time to explore, and absorb information at their own pace, and through experiences that connect to their lives, and not to what textbook authors assume to be shared understandings that in fact are alien to these children. We cannot possibly do this in an environment that says that “all” children of a certain age, or grade level, will do ‘x.’ I do not mean that we should have lower expectations for these children but rather that we adopt a model of “equafinality,” — the idea that everyone will get to some point eventually, but that there are different paths, and times for doing so.