Education Next – Chester E. Finn, Jr. and Chad Aldis
“The central problem with making growth the polestar of accountability systems, as Mike Petrilli and Aaron Churchill argue in “Stop Focusing on Proficiency Rates When Evaluating Schools,” is that it is only convincing if one is rating schools from the perspective of a charter authorizer or local superintendent who wants to know whether a given school is boosting the achievement of its pupils, worsening their achievement, or holding it in some kind of steady state. To parents choosing among schools, to families deciding where to live, to taxpayers attempting to gauge the ROI on schools they’re supporting, and to policy makers concerned with big-picture questions such as how their education system is doing when compared with those in another city, state, or country, that information is only marginally helpful—and potentially quite misleading.”(more)