The magazine U.S. News & World Report launched its first-ever national and state rankings of elementary and middle schools last week, with some K-8 schools being members of both lists.
The rankings are “almost entirely rooted in students’ performance on mathematics and reading/language arts state assessments” from the 2018-19 school year, the release declares. That data was collected from standardized state-based tests that students took before the pandemic. And that is a key point.
Because of the ways in which the pandemic has altered almost everything about schools, the rankings are invalid and horribly out of date.
Any measure of reliability, which was not but should have been reported in this somewhat amateurish attempt at summarizing standardized test data, would show very little correlation between the rankings and the quality of education being delivered by the institutions, about 118,000 of them, according to the release.
The rankings do not merit review or further comment, except to reveal an obsession on the part of some readers for rankings of things.
It does, however, give me an opportunity to talk about professional development for teachers. One of the purposes of publishing rankings like this—although the value for kindergarten classrooms still escapes me—is to showcase programs that work. This was done, before Covid-19, at workshops, seminars, partnerships, and similar activities with teachers. These activities have decreased in quality during the pandemic, mainly because they have been offered only online.
While Zoom works for organizing a schedule, it really falls short when it comes to learning—for students or teachers.
U.S. News & World Report says their rankings are the only national rankings of elementary and middle schools. Maybe there’s a good reason no other publication has attempted such a ranking, but the reasons do not merit discussion. What has apparently happened, though, is that teachers are not learning from other teachers as much as they were before the pandemic, and the magazine’s editors, given that they rank hospitals, graduate schools, and other institutions, felt a void.
Well, the void in professional development exists, all right. But the rankings fill that void with the utmost paucity, if at all. Teachers still can’t learn about programs at other schools, and that’s because they can’t collaborate with teachers at those schools in an organized exchange of best practices.
Teachers barely have enough time to plan their own lessons right now because of staffing shortages. The shortages across the board are “crushing schools,” writes Mark Lieberman in Education Week, which does rank state education departments but doesn’t go any deeper than that in the publication.