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Governor Jan Brewer signed a bill that changes the language used to rate schools’ achievement profiles from actual words to letters.
Currently, schools are given designations like “excelling,” or “under-performing,” as a way to describe to parents and the public how well the school performs academically.
The change makes it so that schools are now rated the same way an English paper is graded, using an A-F letter system.
This ought to pull Arizona’s failing schools right out of the gutter.
The change comes after a visit from former Florida Governor Jeb Bush last October, where the former first-brother described to Arizona lawmakers methods he used to improve schools in Florida.
As we reported back in October, after a full afternoon with Bush, changing the language used to rate the schools was apparently the best idea they came up with.
Arizona schools Superintendent Tom Horne seems to think the change is as useless as we do.
“Our ratings provide some description,” Horne told New Times back in October. “I think people reading them get a better idea of the school.”
The new law goes into effect in 2011.
