The Alabama Department of Education recently released its annual 'Report Card' for school systems and schools across the state and our personal feeling is those scores released are as worthless as the paper they are written on.
We'll admit that we don't know all the factors that go into the mathematical equation that determines whether a school or a system receives an A, B, C, D or F. Our bet is the majority of the score comes from some standardized tests that determine students' learning.
We agree with Escambia County School Superintendent John Knott that what's going on in the individual schools “cannot be determined by a letter grade.”
Many factors go into the state report cards, including achievement, growth, graduation rates and more. But we wonder how much weight is put toward the economic situation some of the students come from?
Our bet is that some of the best teaching is being done in schools that probably received low grades on the state report card. We wonder how that middle school teacher at Mountain Brook would do if he or she were teaching eighth grade in a middle school in Camden, Greensboro or other schools in the blackbelt. Would their teaching skills be brought into question?
Nobody in this office knows anything about teaching school but our bet is that any one of us could teach at Hoover Middle School and come out looking like the best teacher in the world.
To us, the rubber meets the road when a teacher gets a student to achieve things that student never thought was possible. It's teachers that make a student go that extra mile to improve that impresses us more than any state report card. Bringing a student who has been making D's and F's to C's is a lot more impressive to us that taking a B student to an A student.
It's the teachers who instill the desire to learn who deserve the A.
Take the state report card with a grain of salt. We know we have a lot of great teachers doing great jobs right here in Escambia County.
