In an article published on the Learning Counsel, authors Betsy Hill and Roger Stark write …
A number of state departments of education are working to remove the grading systems for schools that were established in the No Child Left Behind era. The idea behind those systems was that parents needed a simple way to understand how the schools their children attended were performing. They would then be able to make more educated decisions about where to send their kids to school.
If the question is whether the A-F system of rating schools were helpful and easy for parents to understand, then you’d have to ask why there are millions of students still attending schools with D and F grades. A second question is: Does a single letter grade tell a parent any more about a school than it does about a student?
The A-F system is based, as many other things that have happened in education, on an effort to standardize the processes in schools. But all this standardization is misplaced when we really take a look at how learning happens and realize that providing a single standardized approach to instruction is doomed to failure since every child learns differently.
