Report Cards

I'm currently putting together a short presentation on the school I'm working at (wooo spring break is fun!) and this is blowing my mind.

I feel like this is probably true for most states, but I haven't checked so right now I'll just talk about what I actually have researched. The state of New York gives every school a yearly report card, which deals with all sorts of stuff about the school and ultimately reports on how well the school is doing at, well, being a school. Here are a couple of things that stuck out.

From 2008-2011, the average freshman class size was about 900 students. In the same time period, the average senior class size was just over 600 students.

In my high school, if you were missing class(es), if you were absent, if something happened, people noticed. I am so interested to see what it looks like when people don't notice. That's not a thing I even knew existed.

Also from the report card, I'm learning a lot about the different levels of being a school. It also is crazy to me that America doesn't have general standards for all schools. Education is important, right? Right? We should be learning, I think. I think learning looks different for everyone, but I also believe everyone should have the opportunity to learn really well, whatever that means for them. Anyways, on this report card there's a thing called "school accountability" and there are different levels of accountability into which schools are classified. The best is "good standing," which is code-speak for your school's doing it right. Then there is "improvement," a.k.a. you could do better, but then there is also "corrective action," a.k.a. it's time to fix things. But then there is also "reconstructing." As in, there are so many things that are so deeply flawed that you need to start over, you need to fix so many things. I'm reading this thinking, why do they have so many levels? How are there schools that are so messed up that they are actually at any of these lower levels? What happened (or didn't happen, really) to cause these schools to be classified as "reconstructing"?

Also, it bothers me that the government or New York State or whoever is assessing these schools, and saying, Yep, you have work to do here, but that's apparently where it ends. How can they do that? How can they look at these schools, acknowledge that there is something seriously wrong, and then leave it at that? Why aren't they trying to do anything to change it? It's like you have a kid who really likes this one book, and that book is on the top shelf of the bookshelf, and the kid can't reach, but all the other people have done is point out that the kid can't reach the book. You'd think maybe they'd give the kid a stepstool, or some way of reaching the book, or maybe if none of that is accessible, they'd say to the kid, hey, we don't have a direct way of reaching this but maybe if you go around and collect some stuff and put it together, you'll be able to reach, or maybe if you work really hard on your parkour skills you can work together with your environment to create a way to reach the book. But none of that is happening. It's almost as if they aren't even acknowledging that the book is there at all. Ignoring the existence of the problem doesn't make it go away. Granted, they're not ignoring the problem, they're reporting it, so at least we know it exists. But I still don't see how that's any better.