We the undersigned are deeply committed to providing a quality education for all our students. We support the need for school accountability and the Department of Education\'s Efforts to recognize schools that make progress with struggling students. However, we are deeply disturbed by the new DOE school progress reports. By awarding a school a grade from A to F, the progress report trivializes the complexity of teaching and learning. It is a punitive system that ultimately hurts, not helps, schools. Some of our major concerns are that the report card: *Overemphasizes testing with 85% of the grade derived from test scores will potentially drive schools into doing even more test prep at the expense of real learning; *is based on a curve so that there will always be losers; *is based on an unfairly narrow definition of progress; *ignores actual student growth from one grade to the next as measured by a variety of assessments; *uses an extremely complicated formula that prevents transparency; *constructs peer groups that are inherently unfair to many schools; *ignores the myriad aspects that make a great school, e.g. individualized instruction, cooperative learning, and community building; *ignores classroom subjects such as science and social studies, classes in art, music, dance, languages and physical education, and extracurricular activities and clubs; *demoralizes whole school communities that have worked hard for the success of their schools. WE SUPPORT AN ANNUAL SCHOOL REPORT THAT IS TRANSPARENT, ACCESSIBLE, COMPREHENSIVE, AND NON-PUNITIVE.

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