North Carolina’s long nightmare of frozen ambiguity could finally be over. Yesterday Representative John Torbett filed a bill entitled ‘Official State Frozen Treat.’ If passed, this legislation would end years of confusion which had residents wasting valuable time eating popsicles, slurpees, and even frozen yogurt. Finally, ice cream will be adopted as North Carolina’s official frozen treat.

After amending the General Statutes to elevate ice cream to its proper status, I’d like to offer a humble request as a public school teacher. Could we please address our practice of assigning school report card grades which more accurately measure levels of poverty than student learning?

North Carolina currently assigns schools performance grades based on a formula of 80% achievement and 20% growth. This approach assumes largely that the playing field is level and all students starting from the same point. But the results clearly show that school report card grades and levels of poverty are inversely proportional to each other.  As poverty goes up, school grades go down:

In fact, failing school grades are so closely linked to poverty that Virginia abolished A-F school grades in 2015, resolving that such measures did not effectively communicate to the public the ‘status and achievements’ of schools.

So for God’s sake, once we’ve done the people’s work on this ice cream problem, could we take a look at how we measure success in our public schools?