School Letter Grades Working Group favors grading schools based on a variety of factors

Members of the School Letter Grades Working Group have attended four meetings this month discussing the right way to provide each public school in Tennessee with a grade.  If there’s one takeaway from that time spent in virtual meetings, it’s that the diverse group of parents, legislators, state education leaders want the grading system to include a variety of factors.When it launches next month, the School Letter Grades system is expected to evaluate student achievement, student growth, and other factors like graduation rates to provide each school with an A through F grade.The working group will recommend how those factors are weighed in the final grade and what data will go into each category.

Achievement Should Measure All Subjects

A general consensus arose during discussions that school achievement should include testing in all subjects and not just math and English language arts (ELA).“Most everybody felt like, that I talked to, if we were required to give the assessment to the students that we ought to include it here,” said Williamson County Schools Assessment Analyst and working group member Kevin Deck.“As an educator in my head is, if you’re testing it, then it’s important. And if it’s important then it should be evident in our grading system for the state,” said Lenoir City Schools teacher and working group member Margaret Bright.In Tennessee, elementary school students in grades 3 – 5 are tested in ELA, math, and science.  Middle school students are additionally tested in social studies and high school students receive testing in biology, U.S. history, English 1 and 2, algebra 1 and 2, geometry, and Integrated Math 1,2, and 3.Most members of the working group expressed a desire to weigh math and ELA more, especially in younger grades where Murfreesboro City Schools’ teacher and working group member Kim Inglish pointed out, subjects like science and social studies don’t receive as much classroom attention.“Kids aren’t even getting science and social studies every day,” said Inglish. “I wouldn’t want science to count as much as ELA and math do.”One proposal members are considering would be to make math and ELA each worth 40 percent of the achievement score and science worth 20 percent in elementary grades and change that in middle and high school to Math and ELA each worth 35 percent and science and social studies each worth 15 percent.“I kind of see science and social studies as being equally weighted, for the reason being that although social studies doesn’t have science in the title, archaeology, geography, all of that falls underneath social studies and those two are STEM careers and so I feel like it plays into that whole STEM focus,” said Lenoir City Schools teacher and working group member Margaret Bright.

Growth Should Matter

Another consensus among working group members was that student growth should be a big part of the final school grade.“Really almost everybody said growth has to be a component, has to be an important component equal to or more than achievement just because of the ability for any school to get a good score from growth. It measures the impact of what your teachers are doing,” said Gibson County Special School District Director of Schools and working group member Eddie Pruett.In Tennessee, growth is frequently measured by the Tennessee Valued-Added Assessment System (TVAAS). Throughout public hearings on the School Letter Grades, multiple communities across the state including Nashville, expressed a preference for prioritizing growth because it better encompasses challenges their schools face with student circumstances, resources and funding, and even teacher shortages.Members of the working group were split on whether the growth portion of the school grade should just be reflected by the school’s TVAAS score or whether it should also be calculated with other information like how well students who are economically disadvantaged, living with disabilities, English language learners, from racial and ethnic subgroups, and low academic performers are growing.If the growth of those student categories are considered in the growth score, Education Fund Director of Advocacy and working group member Venita Doggett told fellow working group members she believes consideration needs to be given that some face greater challenges than others.“You may have African American students also lumped in with Hispanic students and English language learners and so if you have students who are English language learners, they’re gonna have more needs than what an African American student would be,” said Doggett.Other members of the working group expressed concerns about including any student category, as one district may have vastly more English learners and economically disadvantaged students than another.“If you start looking at subgroups, you’re not comparing apples to apples anymore because every school does not have the same subgroups,” said working group member and 2022-23 Principal of the Year Kyle Loudermilk of Kingsport City Schools.The final School Letter Grades system may additionally include elements other than achievement and growth like graduation rates, English language learner proficiency, absenteeism, and teacher retention.Multiple working group members expressed opposition to considering absenteeism and teacher retention in the school grade but there was support to include graduation data and possibly the Tennessee’s Ready Graduate Indicator that evaluates graduation and career readiness.“We like the idea of the different kind of pieces to that so ACT, industry credentials, those things of that nature,” said Doggett.Members of the working group are meeting today to discuss how all the School Letter Grades system should weigh achievement, growth, and other categories in the final grade.The Tennessee Department of Education will take the working group's recommendations into consideration before presenting the School Letter Grades to the Tennessee State Board of Education on November 3.