Quality? review?
Help me out here. How can a guy who has never been to my school before spend a day and a half and possibly know enough to write a review? And a review that turns into a grade? (on some sort of 1 – 5 scale, with names like “Proficient” instead of 3)
Now, the highlights seem to have been positive, and even though they will probably get the grade wrong, my school won’t be in trouble, which suits me just fine.
Paperwork reduction? Didn’t Bloomberg’s Chancellor tell principals they didn’t have to prepare binders? But (last year) “quality” reviewers found fault with lack of evidence being placed into their hands. Which principal will be brave enough not to prepare reams of stuff prior to review?
But that aside. A day and a half? And not by a superintendent? Not by the principal? Not a self-evalutation by staff? A day and a half?
JD2718 
Well, that would be just a silly as trying to determine if a student has mastered the content based upon one test. Oh wait…
The quality review is a joke. Our principal only brought the quality review person to people who would jump when he said to jump! The guy never saw the true school. Although my school is a good and we got a good grade the review meant nothing.
J.D.,
You can ruin almost anything with enough paperwork and checkoff forms, even school visits. In theory, the idea of quality reviews is borrowed from the older (and now defunct) British tradition of a school inspectorate, a sort of expanded accreditation visit and a qualitative reality check. Rhode Island developed an intensive system in the late 1990s, before NCLB, but I recognize that some states have the hundred-page checkoff-form version. And I really would not trust the Kleinberg administration to retain the spirit of an outside check of friendly critics who want you to being doing well but are looking for evidence.
Sherman,
our reviewer had worked with the British system. But you hit it- almost anything can be ruined. Ours, believe it or not, is entirely geared towards use of data. The lie becomes that everything you or I would call a qualitative observation, gets called “qualitative data.” It’s all a joke.
Not that it hurt us, but one of the most attractive parts of the school where I work is the up-beat, positive, collaborative atmosphere, especially among the kids. There’s no box for that.
In my school we got a woman who was obsessed with technology. We had the binders and binders of data, but we were penalized because we didn’t have it on a spread sheet or in a data base. Is THIS the true measure of a successful school?