State moves the target again

State moves the target again

Lancaster Eagle Gazette: The problem with labels is they rarely tell the whole story. In the case of the Ohio Department of Education’s newest label, the story of school performance has become muddled.

This past week, the state unveiled its new label, “persistently poorly performing,” and applied it liberally to school buildings across the state.

The state’s rationale for this is it’s going to a more stringent set of rules when it comes to grading school districts. In some ways, that’s good — our standards should continue to get higher. But the new label isn’t based on new standards; rather, it rearranges a few scores on individual parts of the state report card in the past several years and ranks them accordingly. This is information school districts already have and, in many cases, already have been penalized for on past report cards.

It’s time to settle on standards, stop changing targets, and quit worrying about what labels can be applied to schools retroactively or otherwise.