Simply put, North Carolina should allow student growth to weigh more in the formula that measures school performance grades. (Honestly, we should get rid of it).

This past week a bill passed the General Assembly House K-12 Education Committee that according to an EdNC.org report from Alex Granados “would change the calculation of the grades from 80 percent academic performance and 20 percent growth to a 50-50 split” (https://www.ednc.org/2017/03/15/house-committee-tackles-school-performance-grade-change/).

Granados explains,

“Academic performance is measured by students’ proficiency on statewide tests whereas academic growth is how much academic progress students make during the year.”

For those who suffer from Betsy DeVos’s “I Don’t Know The Difference Between Proficiency And Growth Syndrome”, that means more of an emphasis on whether students are growing from the beginning of the year to the end of the school year.

And this is a step in the right direction for a group of lawmakers who have shown to be less than proficient when it comes to helping public education.

Proficiency is measured by tests. And no, I am not advocating that we eliminate all tests, but when a state can administer tests that are constructed arbitrarily, many times graded by computer, converted by unknown algorithms, and mostly unexplained with ambiguous score reports, then feedback on improvement is almost nonexistent.

Tweak an algorithm here and a cut score there and quite a number of school performance grades change. Proficiency becomes a luck of the draw. Growth then becomes less emphasized when growth is what we are after the whole time.

Athletes train to get better. Professionals work to get better. Skills are worked on to become sharper. They seek growth.

And to think that all of the students who walk in to a classroom come in at the same level is ludicrous. Too many factors affecting their academic performance outside of class weigh heavily on their achievement on the very items that lawmakers say measure “proficiency” – hunger, poverty, health, safety, emotional and mental health, the list goes on.

IF YOU OR ANYONE YOU BELIEVE NEEDS HELP THERE ARE RESOURCES AVAILABLE. PLEASE SEE THIS ARTICLE FOR FURTHER INFORMATION: https://www.betterhelp.com/advice/therapy/how-do-i-find-a-therapist-near-me/.

Ironically, lawmakers can do a lot more about those factors and actually ensure that there is more potential for growth in many of our students.

Granados’s report also talked about one dissenting vote in the committee’s debate about changing the formula for school performance grades.

The lone holdout on Tuesday’s vote was committee co-chair Rep. Debra Conrad, R-Forsyth. She said her county has several D and F schools, but she thinks the emphasis should be on performance because the goal is to get students on grade level. She said that is what academic performance encapsulates.

What Rep. Conrad should maybe consider is that performance gets better when students grow. And if proficiency is measured by moving targets like standardized tests, then what is considered grade level can pretty much be summed up in the same manner.

Are those students growing? That’s the question.

If very schools in her county which received “D’s” and “F’s” were growing students at great lengths but still were not at what she considered grade level, then I would consider those schools and teachers a success. Considering what factors they were against, what odds they faced, and what resources they had to gather on their own, they put students first. They saw progress and had faith in a process.

Where Rep. Conrad looked at a bottom line, maybe those teachers saw real people.

But then again, we could also take that paradigm and shift it to “test” those who seem bent on judging others on proficiency.

With another year sans NCAA Tournament games in a state that literally sweats NCAA basketball, it is rather ironic that Rep. Conrad talk about staying at “grade level” when a bill she openly supported (HB2) is literally hurting our state economically to the point that CBS game commentators talk about it during Duke’s opening round game.

The hundreds of millions of dollars lost because of HB2 certainly is not indicative of being of “grade-level” or of being “proficient.” Hell, it’s not even “growth.”

Oh, by the way, this past week Michigan did away with its school performance grades and even West Virginia did away with it for this year citing inconsistencies with the grading system that so many in Raleigh embraced.

Sounds like the grading system is not proficient.