Education leaders working on the School Letter Grades want student achievement and growth to account equally

When Tennessee launches the School Letter Grades next month parents will be able to see how well their child’s school is serving students by reviewing whether it received A, B, C, D, or F grade. The hard part has been determining what makes one school an A and another a B or lower.The School Letter Grades Working Group held five meetings this month to work that out and most members appear to agree that student growth should matter just as much as student achievement.“Kids in schools like mine can show unbelievably high growth and go from first percentile to the sixty-eighth percentile but if they don’t get over that bubble there’s no change in the achievement score and statistically speaking it was an enormous success for them but it doesn’t actually show up in the achievement measure which is why growth needs to be weighted, I would argue for more but I think in fairness at least equally,” said Libertas School of Memphis Executive Director Bob Nardo, one of the working group members.Where’s there’s disagreement is how much both should matter in the final calculation.Group members discussed having achievement and growth split anywhere from half of the total score that makes up the grade to 90 percent of the total score. The remaining percentage would come from other factors like graduation rates or English language learner proficiency.“I probably feel more strongly about the 40-40-20 than I do about most,” said Metro Nashville Public School Board and working group member Erin O’Hara Block about her preferred split of the score.Some group members argued that growth and achievement should make up a smaller percentage of the score for high school students than elementary and middle school.  Multiple proposals encouraged growth and achievement representing 10 percent less for high school students so that graduation data like the Ready Graduate indicator could play a larger role.Gibson County Special School District Director of Schools Eddie Pruett was part of a breakout discussion that encouraged having the Ready Graduate data that measures graduation and career readiness make up 20 percent of the total score.“You’ve got achievement and growth, and that Ready Grad has that 20 percent, I like that, having that higher percentage in there,” said Pruett.

No Consensus on Measuring Growth

Another area of disagreement is how the School Letter Grades calculation should measure growth.Throughout public hearings on the grading system, multiple communities across the state including Nashville and Memphis, stressed the importance of how growth is measured because it encompasses challenges their schools face with student circumstances, resources and funding, and even teacher shortages.Some members of the working group argued the School Letter Grades should exclusively measure growth through the Tennessee Valued-Added Assessment System (TVAAS) score each school receives.Other members argued the grade should also utilize information about how well students who are economically disadvantaged, living with disabilities, English language learners, from racial and ethnic subgroups, and low academic performers are growing.The Tennessee Department of Education plans to take the recommendations members of the working group provided to create the final grading system that will launch in late November.