SC School Report Cards "A Tale Told By an Idiot"

"Full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."

OK, so Macbeth was a bit soured on life when he said those words, but it's about time for SC voters to be soured on school and district report cards. This latest fiasco is but a case in point.

Are we tired yet of bureaucrats switching tests from year to year so that one set of tests is never comparable with another? Now we have another anomaly to gripe about: who is the idiot who designed these results? We know the name of the company, but where is the goat, because the SC Education Department needs one.

"In Charleston County, the state’s second-largest district, Executive Director of Assessment and Evaluation Buffy Roberts said some of the district’s best-performing schools were dinged on their report cards because their average performance, as measured by state tests, improved by a smaller amount than the state average."

“'The report card’s method of computing progress is slightly misleading because it measures if the school on average grew more or less than the state average, based on the state’s grade-level tests, rather than measuring the amount of academic progress that students actually made individually,' Roberts said." Slightly?

"Buist Academy, a K-8 magnet school whose admissions process is more selective than Harvard’s, earned an overall rating of Average this year. Its rating for academic achievement was Excellent, but its overall score was dragged down by an Unsatisfactory rating for student progress."

In other words, if you're at the top, the amount of progress you can make pales in comparison to a school at the bottom. 

The test designer is mathematically illiterate.