Accountability was the main focus for Cookeville parents, educators, and administrators during a Tuesday night discussion about how schools should be graded for serving students.
The public meeting is the latest in a series of forums hosted by the Tennessee Department of Education (TDOE) to gather state input on how to improve the new School Letter Grades evaluation tool. The tool will provide an A through F letter grade for each public school when it launches in November.
Grading schools based on student academic growth has been a common topic discussed in prior meetings, but this time, multiple speakers stressed the importance of School Letter Grades providing a measurement for student achievement and career/college readiness.
Parent David Stout said that focus will provide accountability for schools if the tool is simple enough for parents to understand.
“What they wanna know is when my child graduates, will they be competitive when they go out into the job market? When they go out in the job market, it’s going to be competitive. They are going to be compared to their peers, they are going to be measured,” said Stout. “So I think lack of accountability is what got us here in the first place. So accountability is going to be critical and a parent should be able to look at a grade like this in the end and determine, ‘is that a school district I want my child to go to?’”
White County Director of Schools and former history teacher Kurt Dronebarger also stressed there is a need to move the pendulum away from growth and back to achievements in order to have accountability.
“We’ve been here before, where achievement was the factor, it was the metric upon we were measured as schools. And I think at that time, the department realized there was more to school than just achievement and that’s when the growth measure really came about. We swung that pendulum perhaps too far to the growth side and it became about that,” said Dronebarger. “Perhaps there is a need to move that pendulum back towards the center for that achievement measure a little bit and no one shies away from that. But my fear is that we might swing the pendulum too far back and we’ve been there before and we don’t wanna make, as a history teacher, we don’t wanna make those same mistakes again.
Other speakers discussed dividing the grading focus between achievement and growth.
Putnam County Schools Direct of Schools Corby King suggested having an academic score and a non-academic score to address what families would want to know with the letter grade.
“On the academic measure, we need to decide what are we trying to measure. What do we want families to know? What are we telling families, what is important? Letter grades should measure what families think they should measure,” said King.
King suggested the academic score should include things such as growth and achievement measures, what type of programs does the school offer such as career and technical education (CTE), what advanced placement (AP) and dual enrollment classes are available and what the participation rates, and how robust is the fine arts program.
The non-academic score would include indicators for how thorough school safety and security is, what mental health resources are available and if the school has met the requirements for counselors and social workers, extracurricular programs, and facilities and maintenance.
Other speakers said clear targets for the letter grades need to be established and consistent for families along with how funding impacts a school’s success.
“One thing that concerns me when we talk about grading schools ABCDF is obviously the amount of funds. We know that schools are oftentimes successful or not based on the amount of funds,” said Putnam County Schools board member Lynn McHenry. “When we start comparing some schools to others, we would definitely need to take a look at how much each student in that county would receive not just from the state, but how much they actually have through a county that has a lot more funds to give than those that don’t.”
Grandparent Cindy Taylor emphasized the previous points as well, telling TDOE to consider a “bell curve” for School Letter Grades and asked if all schools would have the opportunity to achieve an “A” letter grade.
“We do wanna make sure that the A through F letter grade system is intended to be a rating system that conveys information to parents and families. That it can rate meaningfully and differently,” said TDOE Chief of Staff Chief of Staff. “We’re trying to make sure that as we go about implementing this for the very time, implementing this law that we know will have some impacts, that we are thinking ahead about how to be fair, how to convey information meaningfully, but then also what comes next after these letter grades are published.”
The state is planning an additional public hearing in Nashville tonight and a final meeting in Shelbyville Thursday. TDOE is also accepting public comment submissions on School Letter Grades until September 15.
