The Department of Education is considering moving to a single letter grade system.
Image: State Board of Education members, from left, Darrell Cobbins, Robert Eby and executive director Dr. Sara Heyburn Morrison participate in a recent meeting. Image Credit: Martin B. Cherry / Nashville Banner & Canva.
***Note from The Tennessee Conservative – this article posted here for informational purposes only.
This story was originally published by the Nashville Banner. Sign up for their newsletter.
Article by Lillian Avedian, The Nashville Banner [Creative Commons] –
Tennessee is seeking to overhaul how it evaluates school and district performance.
There are currently two education accountability systems: the federal Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA); and the state letter grade. The Tennessee Department of Education is considering combining them into one based on the letter grade system.
ESSA requires states to identify schools as high performing (Reward) or low performing (Comprehensive Support and Improvement; Target Support and Improvement; or Additional Target Support and Improvement). Since 2023, the department has used a parallel state system that identifies schools by A-F letter grades. Schools identified as low performing under the federal system receive intervention and targeted resources.
States are required to follow the requirements set forth in ESSA, the federal law governing K-12 education, when forming their education plans. The U.S. Department of Education under Secretary Linda McMahon has invited states to waive certain federal rules, under the administration’s stated aim of “returning education to the states.”
Dr. David Laird, assistant commissioner of assessment, accountability and research, said that the Tennessee Department of Education has long hoped to unify the two systems.
“Consistently the department has felt — and we hear from directors of schools — that having two different systems that, while correlated strongly, could potentially say different things about a school’s performance in the same year is just not a place I think any of us wish to remain,” Laird said at the State Board of Education’s quarterly meeting on Aug. 27.
One key difference between the systems is that while the federal identification is weighted toward academic growth, the state letter grade is weighted toward proficiency. Growth considers student improvement year over year, regardless of whether those students are proficient.
Laird said this difference means that a school could receive high marks from the federal government yet demonstrate low academic proficiency.
“Ultimately the department decided that if we wanted to communicate clearly and accurately to parents and members of the community, it would be, in fact, not accurate to say this is an incredibly strong school if the overall performance the school was achieving was not what we would want for the majority of our kids,” he said.
Some education advocates argue that weighting achievement above growth is not equitable. Jenny Mills McFerron, assistant director for P-16 policy and research at EdTrust-Tennessee, told the Banner that while achievement and growth matter, measuring both equally can better reflect how schools are helping students improve over time.
“Some student groups, like students with disabilities or students from low-income backgrounds, come into the education system further behind and need more resources in order to perform at high levels, which we know they’re capable of doing,” she said. “What we don’t want to do is have an accountability system that is only reflecting the demographics of the students who are enrolled rather than the efforts of that school to improve student learning.”
The letter grade measures academic achievement, growth, growth of the highest need students, and college and career readiness. In high school, achievement counts for 50 percent of the grade, growth 30 percent, growth of the highest needs students 10 percent, and college and career readiness 10 percent.
The federal system requires more indicators, including the high school graduation rate, chronic absenteeism and English language proficiency. This system also measures student group performance among English learners, students from low-income backgrounds, students of color and students with disabilities.
Laird said the department is considering how to incorporate the graduation rate and English language proficiency into the state system in order to meet federal requirements. He did not mention student group performance.
The Department of Education will soon embark on a year-long process to form its recommendations and gather feedback from directors of schools. Laird said that the department aims to return to the State Board with its proposal and finalize the new system before the start of the 2027-28 school year.
Mills McFerron noted that the process is not as transparent as the one the department undertook in 2023, when it created the state letter grade system. At the time the department hosted 10 town halls across the state with opportunities for public comment and created a working group with 47 members including directors of schools, school board members, advocates, teachers and legislators.
“Federal law requires states to do public comment before making changes to their accountability systems,” she said. “From our perspective, TDOE should be going much further to solicit input from the public, and we’re particularly thinking about groups like parents, students and advocates having the chance to weigh in on the system.”
