WAR and TEA

EDITORIAL

Last week the Texas Education Agency (TEA) came out with its annual report card for Texas school districts and campuses. It was the first time ever for the annual rankings to be boiled down to one number grade. Rockdale’s was 74. That wasn’t exactly a surprise. When the test scores, on which most of that number grade was based, came out last August every school figured out what that grade would be. Rockdale ISD did and they got it right on the money. The new approach has gotten the nickname “A-F scoring” and it is almost universally despised by Texas school districts. They criticize it on two main fronts:

• How is it possible to distill the hundreds of crucial details which make up the art and science of education into one number?

• Since so much of that grade is based on one grade from one test, how can it measure what the school does in educating its students the other nine months of a school year? Said another way: What do these numbers really measure? And what do they not measure? As to the first concern, the one number-approach sounds a lot like the baseball sabremetrician’s one-number-fits-all statistic shortened to WAR (Wins Above Replacement). (A sabremetrician is someone who worships math the way the guys down at Ed’s Highway Tavern worship the Dallas Cowboys). How is that WAR number determined? Dozens of formulas like this one, which determines the worth of a player based on their tendency to ground into double plays: R_gidp=.44X(GIDP_OPPS_player*GIDP_RATE_ lg-GIDP_player). In other words, we just have to trust them. It’s a parallel number-crunching, formulaic determination used by the TEA to boil down the mountain of statistics compiled by Texas school districts into one number. In other words, we just have to trust them. Virtually all Texas school districts aren’t sure that trust is justified. As to the other reservation—what do these scores not measure?—that question has never been answered better than Thorndale Supt. Adam Ivy did back in August when the initial numbers were released to the districts. Ivy was the perfect person to respond. Thorndale ISD had the highest score in Milam County. Yet he challenged the powers-that-be to explain how one score could measure things like teachers who go the extra mile for their students, those who bond together when tragedy strikes, administrators who stretch every penny, coaches who care and spend hundreds of hours away from their families and students who overcome and succeed. He ended with this: “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.” That’s a 100.—M.B.