Indiana schools will have A-to-F grades for 2014-15, although they probably won’t be publicly released until 2016.
The Indiana State Board of Education today approved a resolution that orders state Superintendent Glenda Ritz to issue school A-to-F grades for 2014-15 despite earlier questions raised by Ritz about whether the board’s earlier actions caused the rules for calculating those grades to expire.
That could have meant the Indiana Department of Education would have no formal guidelines for assigning grades. But the state board rejected Ritz’s argument and insisted last year’s rules are still in effect.
“This has been a very confusing process with the rules expiring, the emergency rules,” Ritz said. “I just want to say I’m glad we’re headed to the new rules and the new measures and the new metrics, and we’re moving as fast as we can toward that.”
Education department spokesman Daniel Altman said the tentative date for final grades being submitted to the state board for approval is Jan. 18. Typically, grades are finalized well before year’s end, but the company that makes ISTEP, California-based CTB, reported scoring problems last month that have caused the delay. Schools are expected to get preliminary score data by Dec. 1.
“Obviously we’re dealing with the delay from CTB,” Altman said. “We’ve been working significantly with state board staff and legislative staff and stakeholders to get the timeline as reduced as it could be, and we’re going to get information to schools as soon as it’s possible.”
A letter from Rep. Tim Brown, R-Crawfordsville, expressed concern that grades wouldn’t be issued before the state’s Jan. 31 deadline for when districts must give performance bonuses to teachers. Brown chairs the budget making Ways and Means Committee in the Indiana House. If that bonus money is not used by then, state board spokesman Marc Lotter said, it could go back to the education department rather than be paid to teachers.
The board voted 9-0 to approve the resolution to issue the grades, with Ritz abstaining. When asked by board member Gordon Hendry why she chose not to vote, Ritz cited the confusion about the rules.
“I choose to, I guess, because of the confusing nature of the entire piece and the resolution enacting a rule that is expired,” she said. “It’s probably more procedural than anything.”
Lotter said 2014-15 grades would be determined using the same system as in 2013-14. A new model for figuring out school grades will equally weigh student scores and improvement over prior years. It will be used for the first time for 2015-16 grades.
An A-to-F grade delay can cause schools a variety of problems, as the scores are used in part to determine teacher raises, as well as guide the state board to decide if it needs to take over schools with repeated F-grades.
Ritz’s team argued earlier this month that the state board’s actions last year to change the way they issued grades for a handful of schools with unusual grade configurations — such as those with some elementary grades and some high school grades — had a secondary effect of invalidating the entire A-to-F system.
The rules, they said, indicate even a small change means there is a new system, and that the old system no longer is in effect.
The Indiana attorney general’s office said in a letter to the board and the department that an expiring emergency rule would not invalidate A-to-F grades and doesn’t negate state law that requires grades to be issued each year.
A legal opinion from Matt Light, with the state’s attorney general’s office, also blocks another proposal Ritz has made. She has suggested A-to-F school grades be “paused” for 2014-15. Ritz proposed grades only be changed and made public if they were better than those from 2014. If scores went down, she said, grades should stay the same.
Pausing grades is “inconsistent with statutory requirements and provisions relating to placement of schools in A-F categories for school performance and accountability,” Light wrote.
Ritz and her team have tried to persuade the state board to “pause” accountability and school grades several times. Recently, those arguments have been spurred on by difficulties schools have had as they quickly implement new academic standards and give new tests after Indiana dumped Common Core standards in 2014.
Light wrote that while it might be valid to argue that new standards and new tests had an effect on accountability, it doesn’t mean that withholding grades is the best option. Plus, he wrote, there’s no evidence that the 2015 ISTEP test isn’t valid or reliable.
“There is always a difficult balance to be struck between the need to establish the validity and reliability of the test items against the burden of time needed to test the items,” his letter said.