Last week the Georgia Department of Education released its annual school climate rating for all public schools in Georgia. Since 2014 the GaDOE has published these ratings which use a complicated formula of factors ranging from student attendance and survey results to incidents of violence or drugs on campus to generate a single “climate star” rating of 1 to 5 for each school in the state, with 5 being the highest possible score. Like its effort to boil school performance into a single CCRPI score or teacher effectiveness into a single Teacher Keys score, the state’s climate ratings, in my opinion, don’t provide much value compared to the time and attention they receive.
As per usual, local press and posts on social media tout schools’ ratings as evidence of their success or failure without really even understanding what the ratings mean (I observe the same thing happening when CCRPI scores are released each year). In fact, many of the indicators included in schools’ ratings are only partially within a school’s immediate control (like student attendance or measures of whether students have access to drugs or alcohol at home) or are based on surveys that might have low response rates or are influenced by other factors. So a school with a lower rating may actually be a place in which most students, teachers, and families would say a positive school climate exists. As I scanned this year’s climate ratings, I saw several schools I know that I would categorize this way.
Since both campuses of ANCS received high climate scores, you might wonder why I find fault with these ratings. I care because I find systems that purport to capture all the complexities of school/teacher/student performance in a single score/grade/rating to be misleading and, often, counterproductive to the purposes they are supposedly designed to serve. The GaDOE says that parents will find school climate ratings useful as a “comprehensive picture of a school’s climate”. But, as I’ve pointed out above, they’re not actually comprehensive but overly simplistic. If you really want to get a sense of a school’s climate, visit the school and take note of what you see and hear (and what you don’t). Do the school’s words on its signs and in its mission statement align with what you see happening in the halls and in classrooms? Are students treated with respect and are their views valued? Is the faculty’s professional judgement held in high regard? Are adults and students kind to one another? Even just one hour in a school will tell you much more than any single rating about a school’s climate and culture.