Memphis educators and parents want new School Letter Grades to be easy to understand

A crowd of roughly two dozen Shelby County parents and educators gathered Wednesday night to explain why they believe ease of understanding and transparency will be critical to a new resource for grading how well schools are serving students.The public hearing is the latest in a series of forums the Tennessee Department of Education (TDOE) is hosting across the state to gather input to improve the new evaluation tool called School Letter Grades. The department plans to launch it in November to provide the public with an A through F grade for each public school.At Wednesday’s forum at the Southwest Tennessee Community College Macon Cove Campus, parents and educators focused their feedback more on making the School Letter Grades understandable and transparent for parents than on specific changes to accountability measures.A few community members commented that the letter grade alone would not be enough to give the full picture because it doesn’t account for every little thing.“My comment would be to make it very easy for parents to drill down so that we can see exactly all the metrics and how that they you know, the formula for coming up with that letter because the metrics are very difference that you know, all those that are up are very different. So, to combine them all into a single frame, I think is not as helpful as providing each of those metrics and, and the results of each one,” said a community member.School district administrators echoed a similar big picture concern about the new resource.Germantown Municipal School District board of education member Brian Curry said he worries parents might get the wrong impression if the School Letter Grades focuses strongly on growth.“Growth though is a concern. Our district, a lot of hard work has gone in our educators and families we've worked so we're at 80 percent for third grade literacy which leads the state. But our growth, it's going to be very hard for us. We've got a goal to go to 90. That's, that's gonna be astronomically tougher than it was going from maybe, you know, 70 to 80,” said Curry. “I just don't want the growth to be so heavily weighted as we go forward because again, every district is going to be different and just because we might only have, you know, one percent that doesn't mean that our educators aren't doing work and, and we certainly don't want to be penalized for that.”Memphis-Shelby County Schools Deputy Superintendent of Schools and Academic Support Angela Whitelaw also brought up growth.Dr. Whitelaw pointed out the growth measuring is important for schools in her district to give parents a fair picture of how schools are serving students.“While some people want some school districts, rightly so, thinking about growth and thinking about academics, but I also wanted to be fair for those schools based on the students that we serve that our students are recognized for their growth,” said Whitelaw. “Our goal is to grow we can definitely then achieve. Not saying that we don't want to be measured by the same criteria points, but I do think that there are always two sides to every story.”The next School Letter Grades town hall will be held at the Dyersburg Middle School from 5:30 PM to 7:00 PM. Information on where and when future meetings will take place can be found on the department’s Facebook page.