JACKSON, Miss. (AP) - Mississippi’s Board of Education approved a school grading plan Thursday that’s likely to produce more A-rated districts and fewer F-rated districts.
Officials will produce grades for school and districts using the current scoring table as well as one adjusted to remove inflated test score growth expectations. Schools would be assigned the higher of the two grades when results from the 2016-2017 school year are announced in October. All schools would be graded using the new, adjusted table in 2017-2018.
Thursday’s plan was put forward after officials in some low-scoring districts complained that going directly to a new table this year would be unfair to them. That’s because the state planned to re-rank districts from top to bottom and assign grades based on a predetermined curve the board approved last year after bruising debate.
That meant 14 percent of districts would get F’s, no matter how much their scores improved. Supporters of low-scoring districts said the curve was unfair because districts that would have improved enough to reach a D under the old system would again be labeled as failing. Any district that fails for a second time could be taken over by the state.
State Superintendent Carey Wright said she ultimately agreed, after strong pushback, that it was unfair to change the grading system in a way that penalized some schools when Wright and state board members had promised no changes this year.
“We felt that it was late in the game to be applying a brand new cut score on schools that had been working toward a score, but we needed to reset because of the inflated growth,” Wright said.
Board members Charles McClelland of Jackson and Johnny Franklin of Bolton voiced strong opposition. Franklin said the board needed to stop “jerking folks around.”
“When we say to teachers, ’This is the expectation,’ how in the world are they going to believe us?” asked Franklin, the only board member to vote against the plan.
The most important elements in Mississippi’s A-to-F grading system are tests scores and how many students made progress on tests from the year before. State officials call that second measure growth.
Because Mississippi shifted tests two years in a row, calculating whether students did better on an entirely different test was challenging. Officials now believe that last year’s calculations overstated how much test scores grew. Expectations of continued high growth ended up baked into the scoring system adopted in 2016, and when officials ran preliminary grades for 2017, the projected number of A-rated districts fell to seven from the current 14. Officials said that made no sense because statewide test scores improved.
District officials seemed largely mollified by the plan.
“I think it’s a fair change,” Jackson County schools Superintendent Barry Amaker said. His district vaulted to an A rating last year in part because of strong growth.
It’s the second time in recent years that officials have given schools the choice of two grades. After 2013-14, districts could keep an older, higher grade if their test scores fell, but use a better one if scores rose. Officials said there was a mismatch between what students were learning under Mississippi’s then-new Common Core-linked academic standards and older standards that the test covered.
There’s still some uncertainty about Thursday’s decision. For example, teachers in schools with A and B grades in 2015-16 and those that improved a letter grade that year shared a $20 million bonus pool. McClelland asked whether the board was unfairly giving that money to people who didn’t really earn it.
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