Current:Home > FinanceChanges to Georgia school accountability could mean no more A-to-F grades for schools and districts -Global Finance Compass
Changes to Georgia school accountability could mean no more A-to-F grades for schools and districts
View
Date:2025-04-18 08:05:50
ATLANTA (AP) — It’s getting more complicated to tell how Georgia public schools are faring.
The state Department of Education on Thursday released a full spectrum of school accountability numbers for the first time since the COVID-19 pandemic. But there isn’t a single number to sum up the performance of any one school or district. And that could ultimately mean the end of Georgia’s A-to-F letter grade system for schools and districts.
Discarding that single number accomplished a long-held goal of state Superintendent Richard Woods, who says it’s unfair to measure schools on just one yardstick. Woods won approval from the U.S. Department of Education in October to stop calculating a single number in the College and Career Ready Performance Index.
Georgia was one of a number of states nationwide that adopted A-to-F letter grades for schools. But the system has faced backlash as putting too much emphasis on standardized testing and labeling lower-performing schools as failing.
Woods, a Republican elected statewide, said in a statement that the old 100-point single score “vastly oversimplified the complicated factors that influence school quality.”
“With this change, the CCRPI is more like the ‘report card’ it was always intended to be — encouraging schools, families, and communities to dig into the data and both celebrate achievements and address issues that tended to be obscured by the single score,” Woods said.
Instead, Georgia now publishes only the component parts of the index: academic content mastery, readiness, progression, on-time high school graduation, and whether underperforming groups are closing academic gaps.
And even for those measures, there is no single number to sum up how a district is doing on any component, only separate measures of performance for grades prekindergarten to 6, grades 6-8, and grades 9-12. That also means a single school with students from more than one of those grade bands, like one with students in grades K-8, gets multiple measures for different grade levels.
Content mastery in the 2022-2023 school year showed increases from the 2021-2022 year, in line with standardized test results released earlier this year. They showed test scores rose, but haven’t returned to where they were before the pandemic. Content mastery rose most in elementary grades and least in high school grades.
Deputy state Superintendent Allison Timberlake said the state doesn’t calculate measures of statistical significance for changes in the scores, but said she regarded the increase in content mastery scores as “practically significant” across a statewide enrollment of 1.75 million students.
Woods said progress and readiness scores reached their highest-ever levels. However, readiness scores are not comparable to earlier years because of changes in how the number is calculated. Timberlake said there are also small differences from previous years in the measure of whether students are closing gaps.
A separate agency, the Governor’s Office of Student Achievement, is required by state law to calculate the 100-point scale, and has been the one that assigns letter grades. Joy Hawkins, the office’s executive director, said it’s unclear whether that office will be able to calculate a 100-point scale or issue letter grades. Those A-to-F grades were last issued following the 2018-2019 school year.
The Governor’s Office of Student Achievement “is seeking ways to provide useful continuity of research and comparability with past years of CCRPI reporting for all audiences,” Hawkins wrote in an email to The Associated Press.
veryGood! (82)
Related
- Head of the Federal Aviation Administration to resign, allowing Trump to pick his successor
- Montana sheriff says 28-year-old cold case slaying solved
- In late response, Vatican ‘deplores the offense’ of Paris Olympics’ opening ceremony tableau
- Handlers help raise half-sister patas monkeys born weeks apart at an upstate New York zoo
- Tom Holland's New Venture Revealed
- Taylor Swift Terror Plot: Police Reveal New Details on Planned Concert Attack
- Americans tested by 10K swim in the Seine. 'Hardest thing I've ever done'
- Who Is Olympian Raven Saunders: All About the Masked Shot Put Star
- Travis Hunter, the 2
- Maine leaders seek national monument for home of Frances Perkins, 1st woman Cabinet member
Ranking
- This was the average Social Security benefit in 2004, and here's what it is now
- Utah bans 13 books at schools, including popular “A Court of Thorns and Roses” series, under new law
- In late response, Vatican ‘deplores the offense’ of Paris Olympics’ opening ceremony tableau
- Huge California wildfire chews through timber in very hot and dry weather
- Pressure on a veteran and senator shows what’s next for those who oppose Trump
- Second person with spinal cord injury gets Neuralink brain chip and it's working, Musk says
- Utah bans 13 books at schools, including popular “A Court of Thorns and Roses” series, under new law
- Christina Hall Jokes About Finding a 4th Ex-Husband Amid Josh Hall Divorce
Recommendation
Federal court filings allege official committed perjury in lawsuit tied to Louisiana grain terminal
Fewer Americans file for jobless benefits last week, but applications remain slightly elevated
Dead woman found entangled in baggage machinery at Chicago airport
15-year-old Virginia high school football player dies after collapsing during practice
'As foretold in the prophecy': Elon Musk and internet react as Tesla stock hits $420 all
Average rate on a 30-year mortgage falls to 6.47%, lowest level in more than a year
Cate Blanchett talks new movie 'Borderlands': 'It's not Citizen Kane!'
West Virginia corrections officers plead guilty to not intervening as colleagues fatally beat inmate