EDITORIAL
The most important thing to take away from the new school “report cards” which were issued last week by the Texas Education Agency (TEA) is that everybody is all right.
This year the report cards look like exactly that. A report card. It’s the first time ever the TEA has attempted to place an A-F grade on an entire district.
As you can see on page 1A, all of Milam County’s districts “passed.”
You might think it would be impossible to boil down everything about a school system to one letter grade, and have it actually mean something. And you would be right.
It’s really an annual game. And everybody knows it. There’s so much it doesn’t measure. The Reporter asked Thorndale ISD Supt. Adam Ivy for a comment on the scores—and remember Thorndale had the highest ones in our county—and Ivy hit it out of the park.
“I believe an accurate accountability system cannot be based upon one test, taken on one day,” he said. “We have school 170 days per year. Under the A-F system what happens on the other 169 days has no bearing on the perceived success of our districts.”
Ivy compiled an impressive list of “so many more things that define Thorndale ISD”, asking how could this rating measure, among many other factors:
• A community that loves their kids and school.
• Counselors who help kids get through very tough times.
• Students that take care of each other when tragedy strikes.
• Students who succeed, even through extreme circumstances.
• Coaches who spend hundreds of hours away from their families.
• Custodians who make sure everything is clean and still manage to learn every student’s name.
• Maintenance workers who never complain when asked to maintain 50-year-old buildings.
• A central office that finds a way to stretch every dollar to its limit.
• Teachers who spend every night and weekend planning and grading and praying for their students.
Indeed. Ivy knew he wasn’t speaking only for one district. either. He added:
“I know every school in Milam County can put together a similar list of all the awesome things they do to make their schools great...We are all dealt different hands and we put our resources into making that hand the best it can be. Sometimes circumstances get the best of us, but that never stops us from trying to provide the best education we possibly can.”
Now, that’s an A-plus!—M.B.
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