Introduction
Whenever you write something, you’re always supposed to have audience in mind. I do not have one in mind for this blog. It can be for educators or laypeople. I just want people to understand what is going on in education in the state of TN, what the implications are for their school, and how to interpret the results that they are seeing for letter grades for their school.
I will not debate the merits of this letter-grade system here. It’s already done, and I already spoke publicly at the public forum offered. In addition, I have signed more than one letter regarding these letter grades, and everything we warned about them has already borne fruit in less than 24 hours. The marks are already out here marking. Having seen that happen is what has inspired me to explain how these work and what they mean.
Disclaimer
I am not going to dumb this down. It isn’t that complex, but it’s more complex than, say, basic sports stats. Laypeople shouldn’t have any problems understanding this, but I just want to ward off any criticism that I’m writing some sort of arcane nonsense. If that’s what it is to you, then that’s just what it is.
Also, to be clear, I am writing this in my capacity as a private citizen, and any opinions here are my own and are not representative of the Campbell County School System or of East Tennessee State University.
Something that needs to be said
We weren’t informed that we would be given these grades until this Fall. This is like the teacher telling students that the way their grade is going to be calculated is totally different than what it was all semester.
The state has issued accountability protocols with the accountability metrics. We’re used to having these at the beginning of the school year for that year’s data, not for the previous year’s.
How were we “graded” before?
Accountability, agreed to in our ESSA plan, looked at several different factors, including Achievement, Growth, Chronic Absenteeism, Graduation Rate, Ready Graduate Rate, and English Language Proficiency Assessment. You can see how this accountability is laid out below (source).
Those are the weights and measures. The final score is calculated by weighting all students with 60% and students in subgroups (Black/Hispanic/Native American, Students with Disabilities, Economically Disadvantaged, English Language Learner) 40%. This is what a typical federal heat map looks like.
As you can see, this school scored 3.5. This is high enough to be a reward school in years past (anything school with a score greater than 3.2 was designated as a reward school).
You can see they had an “Absolute” and “Target” score. And the state takes the higher of the two. The TDOE completely did away with this. This is why many schools who are used to having high accountability scores are receiving low grades this year. The goalposts have moved.
How we are “graded” now:
This is a much simpler formula, and that might seem like a positive thing at first glance, but once you dig into how all of these metrics are determined, then you really see how much different of a system this is.
Let’s look first at how achievement scores are determined by federal accountability.
This means that schools with 45% or better of their students scoring proficient on the state test or meeting their double AMO (twice the amount set for their Annual Measurable Objective) will receive a score of 4 out of 4 for the achievement category. Let’s look how the state changed this for their accountability.
They spilt it into three grade bands, and they made the elementary and middle achievement higher at 49.5% and 45.4% respectively. The high school achievement score is lower at 40.1%. This is to earn maximum points. This begs the question why didn’t they include the pathway for improvement?
Growth
Growth is measured the same in both accountability systems, however, growth has been interesting in the state of TN since COVID. Because of Shelby County and Davidson County having multiple virtual years, this has really changed growth for smaller counties. Since growth is a metric that’s based on comparing students to their peers, and specifically, it’s comparing how students perform from one year to the next (have fun reading about it here) for grades 3-8 and comparing how students perform based on a predicted score, it’s hard to show growth when over a hundred thousand students in the pool would have had artificially low scores during and right-after COVID. Can you still show growth despite this? Yes, but you would have to really outscore the means from before. This is why despite showing tremendous gains in Achievement, Campbell County schools are still having trouble showing growth. Look at the improvement Campbell County has had in Achievement over the past three years. It is counterintuitive that this did not also turn into growth like it would have in pre-COVID years.
Subgroups
The following groups of students are recognized as historically underserved student groups:
BHN (Black/Hispanic/Native American)
ED (Economically Disadvantaged)
SWD (Students with Disabilities)
ELL (English Language Learners)
For federal accountability, we were held accountable for how these groups of students performed. It is a huge part of our planning. As you can see below, they’re weighted for 40% of federal accountability.
Schools that have a high percentage of these students have depended on their performance to have a high score for federal accountability. Repeating myself here, but it’s 40% of the school’s accountability score.
For state accountability, this completely changed. Now, these students only count for 10% of the accountability score, and it’s the growth score for only the students who score in the bottom 25%. If that sentence is confusing, you’re not alone. Having groups of students go from 40% of your accountability to 10% is shocking enough, but using a metric like a bottom quartile also makes this group of students fluid and not easily identified for intervention.
CCR (not the band)
College and Career Ready is a new metric that the state is using to see the percentage of students who are taking advantage of Early Postsecondary Opportunities (EPSOs). This is like the federal metric, Ready Graduate, but it differs slightly, and it’s an easier metric to attain. Here is a chart of how they differ. Also included is a metric for TISA graduates, which is something that triggers additional outcome funding, but it isn’t part of the accountability model.
Conclusion
Hopefully this will help you understand how Letter Grade accountability differs from what schools are used to. Let’s keep in mind that all of this is based on some pretty flawed logic. How a student performs on one test on one day is interesting information for a teacher, but it shouldn’t be used to evaluate a teacher or school or district.
If you want to read more about accountability, I suggest this blog post.
If you want to read a Director of School’s thoughts on all that’s happening here, please read this.