School Performance Transparency Bill Clears Committee
By: Stephen Crews
Updated: April 4, 2012
A
bill to provide parents and communities more transparent and consistent
evaluation
of the performance of public schools today cleared the House Education
Policy Committee priming it for a vote by the full House as soon as next
week.
House
Bill 588, by Rep. Terri Collins (R-Decatur) calls for the State
Superintendent of Education
to develop a system that evaluates school performance and assigns grades
of A, B, C, D or F to allow parents and communities at large to better
know how their children are being served by local public schools. The
bill requires the grading system to be developed
by the end of this year and implemented during the 2013-2014 school
year.
"Parents
deserve to know the how their child's school is performing," said Rep.
Collins.
"How can a local community know what is needed to improve their school
system if the public doesn't know how the local schools stack up?
Everyone always talks about having more parental involvement and local
community 'buy-in' for public schools. When we start
being honest with parents and community leaders about the true quality
of their schools, you watch how interested and invested they become in
public education."
The
bill calls for using state-authorized assessments and other key
performance indicators
that give a total profile of the school or the school system, such as
student achievement scores, achievement gap, college and career
readiness, learning gains, and other indicators impacting student
learning and success as determined by the State Superintendent
of Education. The school grading system would be consistently applied so
that grades of one school or system may be compared to the grades of
any other school or system.
"We
need more consistency in school evaluations," Rep. Collins added.
"Working with House
Speaker Mike Hubbard and my colleagues in the House, we've researched
how this reform has succeeded in other states. We even met with former
Florida Governor Jeb Bush, whose record on education reform speaks for
itself. He told us that implementing an accurate,
consistent, easy-to-understand school grading system was the single
reform most responsible for Florida's extraordinary gains in education."
House Speaker Mike Hubbard applauded Rep. Collins for this bold, yet simple policy reform.
"Rep.
Terri Collins is a champion for improving public schools, and we are
lucky to have
her in the Alabama Legislature," Speaker Hubbard said. "This is a common
sense reform that will result in local communities becoming more
informed about what's going on in their public schools and, therefore,
more involved. While we work to improve our overall
education system from the ground up, we must also allow parents,
educators and community leaders the flexibility to fix local problems
with local solutions. That starts with transparency."
