City should restore accountability to its school system

Under the Bloomberg administration, New York City was a model for school accountability. The city’s Progress Reports evaluated schools based on a variety of factors, with an emphasis on student standardized test scores. The city then graded each school’s overall performance from A to F and widely publicized the results. And this strategy worked: struggling schools improved.

Shortly after Mayor de Blasio took office, he and his Schools Chancellor Carmen Fariña took aim at this accountability system. They claimed that any single measure was too simplistic to classify the performance of an entire school. They also worried that classifying schools as “failing” discouraged schools, rather than motivating them to improve. In the fall of 2014, the administration stopped issuing school grades on its School Quality Reports.

In a new study for the Manhattan Institute, I found that by eliminating the letter grades the administration also removed a positive effect that the policy was having on the city’s worst schools.

My analysis first shows that schools that received an F grade in 2013 improved more than they would have if they had instead received a D grade. This is consistent with prior evidence finding a similar positive effect from the F-grade sanction following the first letter grades given in the fall of 2007.

In the first year of de Blasio’s system, the city stopped giving letter grades, but otherwise reported nearly identical information about school performance as was included under Bloomberg. This allowed me to effectively recreate the Bloomberg-era letter grades and show that the positive impact of receiving an F grade disappeared once the city dropped letter grades from their reports.  

By no longer singling out struggling schools, the city removed a real incentive for them to improve. Simply reporting the same data without a letter grade isn’t enough. The key to effective school accountability is to publish a simple summary measure that can be understood by everyone from parents to policymakers. To put the point crudely: Nothing says failure like an F.

The previous system was not perfect, nor does the city’s current accountability system lack merit. Rather, what my analysis makes clear is that the city lost an effective aspect of its accountability policy when it stopped grading schools. When the city’s worst schools received a failing grade, on average they responded by making performance improvements. Today, schools are still struggling, but the city is failing to hold them accountable effectively. For the sake of students at these low-performing schools, New York City should recommit itself to school accountability and go back to grading schools. At the very least, the city should adopt some summary measure that clearly identifies the top and bottom performers.

Marcus Winters is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and the author of two reports on school accountability, “Grading Schools Promotes Accountability and Improvement: Evidence from NYC, 2013-15” and “A Farewell to Reform: NYC's Education-Accountability System.”