Hello, It Is Called A GPA

March 1, 2013

Hello, It Is Called A GPA

On Tuesday, the Missouri House of Representatives passed a bill that was originally intended to give letter grades to individual schools. The argument in favor of this is to give parents easily accessible information about how their school is doing.

The initial idea was to provide a single letter grade for the school, but that single letter grade was removed via an amendment. Mike Wood, associate executive director of government relations for the Missouri State Teachers Association, had this to say about the issue:

We support all the data being collected, which the bill calls for, but if your child comes home, he doesn’t get a grade for his whole school experience.

To this point I simply say . . . yes, he does. It is called a grade point average. Or, how about the A honor roll or the B honor roll? Any of these measures recognize a student for his or her overall performance, not for his or her performance in any single subject.

Wood goes on to say:

He gets a grade for everything, because in some areas he’s probably stronger than others. If a school does one thing very well and another thing not so well, is a letter grade going to reflect that?

Wood is missing the point of a single letter grade. The single letter grade is supposed to simplify the information so you can see how a school is doing overall. His argument is akin to saying we should not look at a baseball player’s batting average, because he may do well against fastballs, but not so well against curveballs.

While I agree that we need to look at a school’s performance from many different angles, I see a real benefit to providing an overall score for a school’s performance.

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6 Comments »

I remember a Mick Jagger interview when he was asked if the Beatles were better than the Rolling Stones. His answer was, ‘Better at what?’

I think of comparing schools in that way. What do you want the school [or musical group] to do? Character education? The three Rs? Performing arts? Safety from bad elements of society? Immersion methods?

Simplifying it to a single letter grade will make schools more like colleges re: US News and World Report in that schools will try to game the letter grade system, or ranking, to make their schools fit into the imperfect formula. It also may make that letter all that matters, unfortunately.

Comment by Papillon — March 1, 2013 @ 9:03 a.m.
Papillon,
That is a good quote from Mick Jagger, but I think it misses the mark here. You are right that the single letter grade, as I’ve discussed here, would not account for a host of things that schools do. Like arts programs or language immersion (I think you’ll like an op-ed I have coming out soon that talks about these things).

Think for a second about my analogy about the GPA. It does not tell how a student is doing in pe, or art, or physics, but it does provide a very useful barometer for assessing a student’s overall academic performance. Similarly, it does not tell us how good of an athlete or how talented a singer the student is. Those are pieces of information we look at separately.

The letter grade proposed in the legislature does have a clear definition of what is being evaluated. It is based off of the state’s evaluation tool for schools, the Missouri School Improvement Plan (MSIP 5). MSIP 5 takes into account how well a school is performing in tested subjects in terms of achievement and growth. So, like a GPA it gives us a good overall picture of how well a school is performing in the tested academic subjects. Parents will have to look at other indicators to get a sense of how well the school is performing in other areas.

The letter grade addresses an empirical question. The question you are asking is a qualitative question, just like the interviewer of Mick Jagger. Going back to the quote, if the person would have asked Mick Jagger if they sold more records than the Beatles or if their record sales grew more from one year to the next, those are empirical question and they could be answered.

If we can set objective criteria for students and grade them on their academic performance, then I see no reason that we cannot also set objective criteria for schools an evaluate them.

Comment by James Shuls — March 1, 2013 @ 9:42 a.m.
Here is the op-ed I mentioned in my previous comment.
http://www.educationnews.org/education-policy-and-politics/james-shuls-charter-schools-are-giving-families-options/

Comment by James Shuls — March 9, 2013 @ 3:46 p.m.
“His argument is akin to saying we should not look at a baseball player’s batting average, because he may do well against fastballs, but not so well against curveballs.”
Except that, it turns out, we should not look at a player’s batting average to determine how a player performs. This was proved conclusively by the moneyball era and the introduction of sabermetrics to baseball. It is actually far more important to know how a player does against individual types of pitches, against certain defenses, and in certain offensive situations than how he does overall.

Batting average ends up being an essentially useless statistic with no real value. Looking at batting average actually -hurts- the process of evaluating the player as it creates distortions in examining their performance. It is more than just useless, it is harmful.

Comment by Brett — March 10, 2013 @ 6:58 p.m.
Brett,
You caught me making an analogy to a sport that I do not know very well. Thank you for making that correction. However, I don’t think my failed analogy falsifies my argument for school letter grades. If anything, I just need to change the analogy.

The empirical studies that have been conducted thus far indicate that letter grades spur schools on to higher success. So, it doesn’t appear that the letter grade would hurt schools as you’ve suggested batting averages do for baseball teams.

Don’t get me wrong, I do think we need nuanced information about schools, but I do believe a single letter grade has merit.

Comment by James Shuls — March 11, 2013 @ 8:44 a.m.
I think your GPA analogy was perhaps more apt, as that spurs an examination of what GPA is in modern education.
I have always liked this excellent discussion at city-data’s education forums:
http://www.city-data.com/forum/education/1018427-do-you-think-gpa-accurate-description.html
It has a lot of detailed explanations of the GPA “game”. And that is the danger of a letter grade; you turn the letter grade into a game. Of course, this already happens with Missouri accreditation scores, with standardized test scores, and just about every other form of holistic measurement for schools.

And really, that is where the batting average analogy comes into play. Batting average was used for years as a holistic measurement of the offensive quality of a baseball player. Turned out, it was an ineffective holistic measure. That did not meant, though, that there were not measures available that made much more solid holistic measures, like OPS and later OPS+. Perhaps the biggest problem here is not the letter grade, but setting the letter grade by legislation. There is no real incentive in a legislatively set letter grade to make that holistic measure a quality measure. In baseball, there was a clear motivation to develop sabermetrics.

So, how do you implement a holistic measure, while also implementing the means and motivation to improve the measure itself over time?

Comment by Brett — March 11, 2013 @ 11:17 a.m.

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I remember a Mick Jagger interview when he was asked if the Beatles were better than the Rolling Stones. His answer was, ‘Better at what?’

I think of comparing schools in that way. What do you want the school [or musical group] to do? Character education? The three Rs? Performing arts? Safety from bad elements of society? Immersion methods?

Simplifying it to a single letter grade will make schools more like colleges re: US News and World Report in that schools will try to game the letter grade system, or ranking, to make their schools fit into the imperfect formula. It also may make that letter all that matters, unfortunately.

Comment by Papillon — March 1, 2013 @ 9:03 a.m.

Papillon,
That is a good quote from Mick Jagger, but I think it misses the mark here. You are right that the single letter grade, as I’ve discussed here, would not account for a host of things that schools do. Like arts programs or language immersion (I think you’ll like an op-ed I have coming out soon that talks about these things).

Think for a second about my analogy about the GPA. It does not tell how a student is doing in pe, or art, or physics, but it does provide a very useful barometer for assessing a student’s overall academic performance. Similarly, it does not tell us how good of an athlete or how talented a singer the student is. Those are pieces of information we look at separately.

The letter grade proposed in the legislature does have a clear definition of what is being evaluated. It is based off of the state’s evaluation tool for schools, the Missouri School Improvement Plan (MSIP 5). MSIP 5 takes into account how well a school is performing in tested subjects in terms of achievement and growth. So, like a GPA it gives us a good overall picture of how well a school is performing in the tested academic subjects. Parents will have to look at other indicators to get a sense of how well the school is performing in other areas.

The letter grade addresses an empirical question. The question you are asking is a qualitative question, just like the interviewer of Mick Jagger. Going back to the quote, if the person would have asked Mick Jagger if they sold more records than the Beatles or if their record sales grew more from one year to the next, those are empirical question and they could be answered.

If we can set objective criteria for students and grade them on their academic performance, then I see no reason that we cannot also set objective criteria for schools an evaluate them.

Comment by James Shuls — March 1, 2013 @ 9:42 a.m.

Here is the op-ed I mentioned in my previous comment.
http://www.educationnews.org/education-policy-and-politics/james-shuls-charter-schools-are-giving-families-options/

Comment by James Shuls — March 9, 2013 @ 3:46 p.m.

“His argument is akin to saying we should not look at a baseball player’s batting average, because he may do well against fastballs, but not so well against curveballs.”
Except that, it turns out, we should not look at a player’s batting average to determine how a player performs. This was proved conclusively by the moneyball era and the introduction of sabermetrics to baseball. It is actually far more important to know how a player does against individual types of pitches, against certain defenses, and in certain offensive situations than how he does overall.

Batting average ends up being an essentially useless statistic with no real value. Looking at batting average actually -hurts- the process of evaluating the player as it creates distortions in examining their performance. It is more than just useless, it is harmful.

Comment by Brett — March 10, 2013 @ 6:58 p.m.

Brett,
You caught me making an analogy to a sport that I do not know very well. Thank you for making that correction. However, I don’t think my failed analogy falsifies my argument for school letter grades. If anything, I just need to change the analogy.

The empirical studies that have been conducted thus far indicate that letter grades spur schools on to higher success. So, it doesn’t appear that the letter grade would hurt schools as you’ve suggested batting averages do for baseball teams.

Don’t get me wrong, I do think we need nuanced information about schools, but I do believe a single letter grade has merit.

Comment by James Shuls — March 11, 2013 @ 8:44 a.m.

I think your GPA analogy was perhaps more apt, as that spurs an examination of what GPA is in modern education.
I have always liked this excellent discussion at city-data’s education forums:
http://www.city-data.com/forum/education/1018427-do-you-think-gpa-accurate-description.html
It has a lot of detailed explanations of the GPA “game”. And that is the danger of a letter grade; you turn the letter grade into a game. Of course, this already happens with Missouri accreditation scores, with standardized test scores, and just about every other form of holistic measurement for schools.

And really, that is where the batting average analogy comes into play. Batting average was used for years as a holistic measurement of the offensive quality of a baseball player. Turned out, it was an ineffective holistic measure. That did not meant, though, that there were not measures available that made much more solid holistic measures, like OPS and later OPS+. Perhaps the biggest problem here is not the letter grade, but setting the letter grade by legislation. There is no real incentive in a legislatively set letter grade to make that holistic measure a quality measure. In baseball, there was a clear motivation to develop sabermetrics.

So, how do you implement a holistic measure, while also implementing the means and motivation to improve the measure itself over time?

Comment by Brett — March 11, 2013 @ 11:17 a.m.

March 1, 2013