School grading system on chopping block, Jasper Schools among many looking forward to a change
The current A-F grading scale for schools may be heading for the trash heap.
On Wednesday, the Senate Education Committee unanimously backed Glenda Ritz, Superintendent of Public Instruction, and the bill to repeal the grading scale. The bill going before the Senate will throw out the A-F grading system and have the state Board of Education develop a new system.
According to the Associated Press, Ritz told the committee that she believed using a single grade for schools wasn’t effective when trying to track both student performance and whether they are improving. She said more than 100 schools had appealed their scores but that she couldn’t give them clear answers on how the scores were determined.
She says she supports reporting raw data rather than compiling the scores into a single grade. Ritz’ platform last year included criticism of the new grading scale first used in 2011.
Explaining the grades schools received has been problematic. The Greater Jasper Consolidated School Corporation received an overall grade of an A despite Fifth Street and Tenth Street Elementary Schools both receiving D’s. The Middle School and High School both received an A rating. The low scores for the elementary schools prompted school officials to hold a public meeting with concerned parents to explain the drop in the grades.
This scenario wasn’t exclusive to Jasper as over 40 percent of the individual schools in the state reported drops in their overall grades.
Dr. Tracy Lorey, Jasper Schools Superintendent, stated she supports the move to a different system to grade schools performance. “The idea of revising the accountability designation from A to F to three designations along with revising the system so that it uses data in a little different way is good,” Lorey said Thursday afternoon.
Jasper administration found the current system and scores difficult to replicate locally. “When you have to rely on statistical formulas and analysis that we can’t replicate locally, it makes it very untrustworthy. The growth part of the current system was very much like that, which caused some concern,” Lorey explained. “For example, you (the schools) might have more than what the state average of your students passing the language arts test or math test, but if a certain percentage of those students didn’t make the acceptable growth, you were penalized for that.”
Those penalties dropped the scores considerably for Fifth and Tenth Street Elementary Schools.
The school announced a new approach to reach their goals for improvement in November of last year. The REACH initiative, REACH stands for Rigor, Engagement, Achievement, Collaboration and Holistics, is a strategic plan that will help the school target student groups that are succeeding and ones that are falling behind.
Lorey stated, the practices in the Jasper schools avoid equating all the performances and efforts of students and staffs into one test score. “In my opinion it’s unethical, we would hate to give our kids or staff a grade for an entire course, based on one assessment,” she said. “We try to look at the data on the students’ performance overall, and we look at the subgroups of the students and see how they are performing. We identify trends and then fill gaps in the areas where they may be struggling.”
The information about school performance is important for schools as they continue improving their education goals. “More importantly, it needs to be explainable to our teachers and to our community,” Lorey said. “I think the process by which they arrive at those scores should give us information that we need to continuously improve the programs and instruction we have here.”
