Will A-F grades for schools be too complicated?

State leaders have long maintained that the A-F letter-grade rankings that Arizona’s public schools will receive this fall will be an anchor for improving statewide student achievement.

Once the grades are issued, principals would tell teachers what they need to do to help improve them. Teachers, in turn, would instruct students and parents as to how schools intend to become or remain A-rated.

But many educators and members of the Arizona State Board of Education have voiced a repeated concern in recent weeks: They feel Arizona’s new lettergrade accountability system could be too complicated to be useful for teachers and parents.

AzMERIT test results will overwhelmingly determine what grade most schools get. But education officials are still debating how to calculate the actual grades, which are to be issued in October.

Official AzMERIT results released Wednesday showed math and reading scores modestly improved across the board, but about 60 percent of students still failed the exam.

Arizona schools superintendent Diane Douglas said Wednesday that while she was “pleased” at the statewide improvement on AzMERIT, “We cannot put so much emphasis on one test.”

“In order to be truly accountable, we need to be more transparent in how a school’s letter grade is determined, which is no longer the case under this accountability model,” Douglas said.

“Any Arizona parent should be able to easily understand what an accountability measure means and how it could impact their child’s education.”

Here is what we know about upcoming school letter grades and the latest AzMERIT scores.

Arizona is required by state law to issue rankings to district and charter schools on an A-F scale. Schools will receive letter grades in October, the first time since 2014.

Students’ scores on the state’s standardized test historically have determined a school’s letter grade.

That isn’t changing much with the new letter grades. AzMERIT test scores will determine 90 percent of elementary schools’ grades.

What has changed is the state will weigh students’ improvement on the state’s standardized test “far more than we have in the past,” said Tim Carter, State Board of Education president.

That’s because of where the scores are now. Board members have said the state plans to emphasize student growth on AzMERIT in calculating school grades in the near term because the majority of students are not yet passing the math and reading portions of the exam.

Forty percent of Arizona’s students passed the math portion of AzMERIT, compared to the passing rate of 35 percent in 2015, the first year students took the test. Thirty-nine percent of the state’s students passed the test’s reading portion. It’s an improvement of five percentage points compared to 2015.

The State Board of Education has spent more than a year developing a system to grade schools. It is expected to finalize how the grades will be calculated at a Sept. 25 meeting.

Many educators criticized the old grading system because low grades strongly correlated with high levels of student poverty.

Education leaders have tried to address the criticism while trying to ensure that all schools have the potential to get an A grade.

Those goals have drawn mostly praise from education observers, but it also has partly led to what many board members have described as a more complicated grading system.

For example, the “student growth” slice of the grading rubric that will account for half of elementary schools’ grades will be calculated using two methods. Half will be calculated by how a student improves on AzMERIT compared to their peers. The other half will be calculated by how the student improves on AzMERIT against an expected-growth target.

Jan Vesely, superintendent of the Kyrene School District, said at a board meeting Tuesday that “there are too many levels of complication that, frankly, do not make the model better, fairer or more precise.”

“They simply distort reality. These letter grades are so many steps away from reality and are almost meaningless,” Vesely said. “I would ask for your consideration to create a letter-grade system that is really actionable and understandable for parents, community members, districts, schools and teachers.”