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November 11, 2012

New test score system unfair to students

The Norman Transcript

NORMAN — Editor, The Transcript:

It’s IQ, IQ and IQ. You are born with this number marking your intelligence and it never changes.

You can overachieve or underachieve with high or low IQ, but nothing beats its ability to help or hinder your progress. All the state’s report cards on our public schools tell us is something we already knew.

Schools with the most high IQ kids got the A’s, B’s and C’s. Schools with the most average and low IQ kids got the D’s and F’s.

In the D-rated and F-rated schools, their students, teachers and principals must wear the state’s “scarlet letter.”

Much of their grades were determined by how students performed on one test on one day.

Test scores don’t tell us whether a student is being educated. Test scores only pit school against school, principal against principal and teacher against teacher. The law forbids schools from exposing a student’s score to anyone other than the parents of the student tested.

The state has just done it with their “scarlet letters,” which give our kids a low self-image.

Gov. Mary Fallin and State School Superintendent Janet Barresi had better hire a good lawyer because they should be sued for breaking this law by releasing school grades based on test scores.

Fallin and Barresi have kicked our troubled schools when they are down and held it against them, and that makes it more difficult for them to get up.

But what else should we expect when we put two people and the legislature in charge?

VIRGINIA BLUE JEANS JENNER

Wagoner

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