HOW NOT TO IMPROVE SCHOOLS

NY TIMES - By many measures, Intermediate School 289 is a place parents would be happy to send their children. This year, it was the only middle school in New York City to achieve "blue ribbon" status, a marker of high achievement under the federal No Child Left Behind Act. The leading public schools guidebook calls it a place where "solid academics" are combined with "attention to children's social and emotional development." Educators from around the country routinely descend upon the school, in Battery Park City, to shadow its teachers.

So when Ellen Foote, the school's veteran principal, received a copy of the school's new report card from the city's Education Department, she was taken aback at the letter grade: D.

"It is just so demoralizing to have a number or grade assigned that is just sort of trivializing things," Ms. Foote said. "It doesn't reflect, I think, the valuable work and the very complicated work that we do here."

Throughout the city, principals are bracing for the release this week of report cards from the Education Department that will, for the first time, grade schools on a scale of A through F. Because the report cards will assess schools on how much individual students improve year to year, as well as on a complicated mixture of test scores and other factors, many of the grades are likely to upend longstanding reputations, casting celebrated schools as failures and lauding those that work miracles with struggling students. Some principals refer to the scores as a "scarlet letter."

The schools chancellor, Joel I. Klein, has called the report cards the glue that holds together his entire effort to overhaul the school system, the nation's largest. While other school systems, including New York State's, give schools report cards, few assign letter grades, and few use the kind of complex test data analysis that the city is using.

Mr. Klein plans to tie the grades to rewards, like bonus pay for teachers and principals, and consequences, like closing schools and firing principals. . .

The entire analysis hinges on the accuracy of the data. As recently as last week, some principals throughout the city, particularly in high schools, were panicked that the data was inaccurate. Department officials said they expected to fix most of the errors and would delay the grades for a few high schools because of inaccuracies. . .

Ms. Foote said it was unfair to judge a school on just one year of test scores and ignore gains over the last several years. She said that the percentage of students reading at grade level in her school had increased steadily since 2003, when it was 65 percent. She also said she was surprised to see her school compared to middle schools that required a standardized test for admission, like the Lab School and East Side Middle School.

"I do not want to devote more time to teaching to the tests," she said, adding that she would have to sacrifice art, music and individualized instruction. "Is that what's required now to get a good grade on this progress report? That's a compromise that I don't think I am willing to make.". . .