Education Department officials are overhauling the city’s longstanding system of letter grades for the public schools, agency sources told the Daily News
Schools Chancellor Carmen Farina was expected to give more details at a Wednesday policy speech on the city’s plan to do away with the A-F system of grading schools created under Mayor Michael Bloomberg.
“They’re changing the system,” said an Education Dept. source who asked to remain anonymous because he wasn’t given permission to speak with the media. “It’s a new approach.”
Mayor de Blasio vowed on the campaign trail to end Bloomberg’s system of letter grades that critics said unfairly oversimplified the characteristics of schools.
Agency officials said the new system will eliminate the peer rankings that were meant to compare similar schools.
An agency spokeswoman declined to comment on the plan and said that Farina would reveal more details at her Wednesday speech.
The city still has not released a comprehensive plan that addresses the future of struggling schools.
The new types of school assessments would be released later this fall.
Parents will get a School Quality Snapshot, while school leaders and administrators will get a School Quality Guide that will provide a more comprehensive analysis of each school.
A range of critics including charter school and parent leaders said that the new school ranking system is too little too late.
“Everything that the Department of Education rolls out does not include a plan on how the Mayor and Chancellor are going to improve our school system,” said Mona Davids, president of the New York City Parents union.
“We have yet to see any plan as to how the mayor will improve the outcomes for our children. Were sick and tired of waiting to see what they will do to improve our struggling schools,” she said.
Former Mayor Bloomberg in 2006 implemented a program that issued annual progress reports to schools.
The institutions were given a comprehensive grade, and then graded on four other categories linked to student performance, attendance and feedback from students, parents and staff.
Schools were also graded on how much improvement lower-performing students showed each year.
Under Bloomberg’s program, the letter grades were combined with annual quality review reports used to justify school closures.
The architect of Bloomberg’s grading system, Shael Polakow-Suransky, left this January after Mayor de Blasio appointed Farina as Schools Chancellor.
