Low-Grade Education Public schools to get report cards next year. by john branston What happens after you hang an "F" on a public school? That's what some influential people propose to do in Memphis and Shelby County as early as next year. They're working out the details. They're just not sure what happens after report cards come out. Let's be realistic here. City schools are going to get more F's than county schools. For one thing, city school test scores are lower. For another, the Ad Hoc Committee on School Funding and Performance, which is running this show, is top-heavy with county representation. No one from the city administration, city schools central office, or city council showed up for last week's meeting, the fifth installment of a scheduled six-part series. Committee members twice praised County Schools Superintendent James Mitchell, a regular attendee, for doing "a great job." No one praised the city schools, who are currently leaderless. A community coalition is supposed to come up with a report card that is broad-based and understandable to "Joe Six-Pack," as committee members put it. The current Tennessee Report Card applies to districts, not schools, and it is "too complex," according to Mitchell. The new report card would identify individual schools that are failing or "low-performing" or some such euphemism. "Not many times that I am aware of are there actual grades, but you can kind of figure out what they mean," said Sam Houston, a consultant and accountability expert from North Carolina who is working with the committee. Shelby County Commissioner Buck Wellford, who is chairing the committee, said he would personally prefer something as unambiguous as a letter grade because both the city and county systems have become complacent. "I don't think either system really believes that the funding is going to stop," said Wellford, who is open to school funding increases only if they are tied to strict accountability measures. What impact the official stamp of failure would have on principals, teachers, parents, and students is unclear. "We probably can't close schools," said Houston. "That is just a matter of space, money, public obligation, and on down the line. If you had declining enrollments and plenty of room, then you would have possible options. The reality is that schools that aren't performing can be fixed. We are not talking about a terminal situation." A starting point, he said, is "strong leadership and a faculty that doesn't blame nonperformance on the children. I won't accept the proposition that all the kids in Memphis are dumber than the ones in Shelby County." He conceded, however, that there are practical problems. "When you start labeling schools, it gets very difficult to get teachers to go in those schools," he said. "In some states, rewards are given to high-performing schools and no rewards to others." There are 162 city schools. If one-fifth are failing -- a realistic grading curve considering that the system test scores are 10 to 15 points below the state average -- that's 34 F's. At 700 students per school, that's 23,800 students. If even half of them get the news that their school is officially failing and decide to get out, that's nearly 12,000 students who have to be absorbed by other city, county, and private schools. There are schools with surplus space, but they're the very ones that are unofficially failing already. Public schools, of course, do not have the luxury of hand-picking their students. Houston calls it the Clint Eastwood syndrome. "The good, the bad, and the ugly come to the door," he said. The public is not clueless about which schools are better or worse than others. TCAP scores are almost 10 years old now, published in the newspaper and available for individual schools. But even accountability proponents like former Tennessee Education Commissioner Jane Walters have doubts about such tests. Walters, who is now executive director of Partners in Public Education, said she is encouraged by improvements in writing tests that confront students with a blank page instead of requiring them to bubble in answers. Houston said education surveys are often misleading. People rank public education in general low but their own school (the one their children attend) high, when in fact its performance is mediocre. Army recruiters in Memphis have complained that high school graduates, even the occasional valedictorian, can't pass the armed forces entrance exam. Last week a Kirby High School student with an A average was denied the right to graduate because he couldn't pass a standardized math and reading test. Whether any education reform group can generate enough steam to actually do anything besides talk is another question. Since it began meeting in February, the ad hoc education committee has been increasingly top-heavy with county representation and light on city representation. At last week's meeting, there were only two city school board members (Jim Brown and Bill Todd) and nobody from the central office, city council, or mayor's office. Not coincidentally, the focus of the committee has shifted from school funding to school performance. The funding crisis was triggered, in part, by the need for new schools in the suburbs because of all the subdivisions, building permits, and tax incentives the city and county have granted. Rather than examine their own decision-making, committee members have instead chosen to look at failing inner-city schools, which lets them point their fingers at someone else.