A-F Accountability Letter Grades: Reform or Different Name, More of the Same?
Education “reformers” are still pushing A-F accountability letter grades. In this approach, districts and schools are given letter grades like a student might receive. Are A-F letter grades a “reform”? I was inspired to write this post because Jimmie Don Aycock, current Texas House Education Committee Chair mentioned in the TFA Policy Forum held at the UT-Austin LBJ School of Public Affairs on 4/22/14 that A-F was his preferred approach to accountability. Current Texas Republican gubernatorial candidate Greg Abbott also released an education platform this week that calls for an A-F letter grade system. Policymakers (in Texas and elsewhere) think A-F is a sexy idea ed reform idea that works. So the question is whether an A-F accountability grading system is a new, more desirable reform for education policy or whether A-F is a different name and more of the same? It turns out there is already allot of evidence out there…
Test-Based Evidence on A-F
In the post The Test-Based Evidence on the “Florida Formula” Matthew Di Carlo, a senior fellow at the non-profit Albert Shanker Institute in Washington, D.C., examined the research on A-F. He wrote:
In the late-1990s, Florida was one of the first states to adopt its own school grading system, now ubiquitous throughout the nation (see this post for a review of how Florida currently calculates these grades and what they mean).The main purposes of these rating systems are to inform parents and other stakeholders and incentivize improvement and innovation by attaching consequences and rewards to the results. Starting in the late 1990s, the grades in Florida were high-stakes – students who attended schools that received an F for multiple years were made eligible for private school vouchers (the voucher program itself was shut down in 2006, after being ruled unconstitutional by the state’s Supreme Court).In addition to the voucher threat, low-rated schools received other forms of targeted assistance, such as reading coaches, while high-rated schools were eligible for bonuses (discussed below). In this sense, the grading system plays a large role in Florida’s overall accountability system (called the “A+ Accountability Plan”).Among the best analyses of the effect of the system is presented in this paper, which was originally released (in working form) in 2007. Using multiple tests, as well as surveys of principals over a five-year period during the early-2000s, the authors sought to assess both the test-based impact of the grading system as well as, importantly, how low-rated schools responded to the accountability pressure in terms of changes in concrete policy and practice.The researchers concluded that test-based performance did indeed improve among the schools that had received F grades during the early 2000s, relative to similar schools that had received a higher grade. The difference was somewhat modest but large enough to be educationally meaningful, and it persisted in future years. A fair amount of the improvement appeared to be associated with specificA-F Accountability Letter Grades: Reform or Different Name, More of the Same? | Cloaking Inequity:
