After more than a decade of rating its schools and school districts with grades from A to F, Mississippi is thinking about replacing that system.
Critics inside and outside the K-12 education world say the A-to-F system, though easily understandable, is oversimplified, puts too much emphasis and pressure on mandatory standardized tests, and demoralizes teachers, parents and communities.
Although there is some merit to the criticism, the problem may not be so much the grading scale but the way schools and their leadership have responded to it. There is undoubtedly too much test preparation that goes on in most Mississippi school districts, with class time being regularly devoted to giving tests to try to determine who is ready to score well on the state exams and who is not. A certain amount of gaming the system also goes on, with lower-performing students sometimes being classified into categories that would exclude their test results from being counted.
There should be a way, though, to curb these machinations. Just as athletic teams are restricted from when they can practice, the Mississippi Department of Education could limit how often practice assessments can be administered prior to the real thing. That would address one of the major complaints from teachers: namely, that they are forced to spend too much time teaching to the test and too little time on developing their students’ academic skills and base of knowledge.
That said, there has been a significant movement in the country away from the A-to-F system of school accountability. During the system’s peak, around 20 states graded their schools and districts with these letter grades. Mississippi is one of just six states still doing so.
The rest use alternative grading systems to try to communicate how their schools perform when compared to others in the same state. Some use one to five stars, others use a numerical index from 0 to 100, still others use a descriptive word or phrase, with various levels of complexity in how much data they provide to explain the rating.
Mississippi House Speaker Jason White, in an interview this fall with the Tupelo Daily Journal, said he would like to do away with most of the state testing and also revamp the accountability model. He thinks Mississippi could get by with two standardized tests: the third grade reading test that most students currently must pass before they can advance to fourth grade; and the ACT college entrance exam that high school juniors take.
That’s a novel idea, but it runs contrary to federal law. The federal government requires statewide assessments in reading and math annually for grades 3 through 8 and once in high school, the results of which are combined with graduation rates and other performance indicators to identify for the public the schools that are struggling.
In Mississippi, there aren’t supposedly many of those -- that’s if you believe the A-to-F ratings. Eighty percent of schools and 87 percent of school districts are presently graded a C or higher. That’s largely because Mississippi grades on a curve, giving extra credit for improvement of test scores even if the raw scores show that the students are still performing below grade level in the subject. The Department of Education is required to raise the standards this year, which should also make the ratings more believable.
Regardless of the labeling Mississippi uses to grade its schools – whether with a letter, a number or words – there are two criteria the accountability system should meet. It should be easy for the public to digest, and it should accurately portray academic performance. If a rating system bogs down in educational bureaucratese or papers over where schools are failing, it becomes a time-consuming but worthless exercise.
