With "hold harmless" provisions in place, it’s hard to know where schools stack up in 2020.
In fact, that’s been the case since the 2017-18 school year — long before the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Each year, the Indiana Department of Education calculates letter grades for schools and school corporations. Testing results and participation rates are among the factors involved in the scoring process.
After state officials canceled spring testing due to the pandemic, they put a hold harmless provision into place. The provision states that a school or school corporation cannot receive a lower A-F grade than the last grade it received.
While that provision makes sense given the circumstances, it’s the second time it has been used over the past three school years.
Schools were also held harmless in 2018-19 due to disappointing Indiana Learning Evaluation Assessment Readiness Network (ILEARN) exam scores. ILEARN was first administered in 2019 to students in grades 3-8 as a replacement for Indiana Statewide Testing for Educational Progress-Plus (ISTEP+).
Despite no new testing, the state released its annual grading report last week. Some of those grades were the same as the 2017-18 school year by default of the double provision.
Bartholomew Consolidated School Corp. and the Flat Rock-Hawcreek School Corp. received the same grades for 2019-2020 as they did the previous year, as did the area private schools.
The overall grade for BCSC was "B." Four schools in BCSC had “C” grades, the lowest grade given among local schools and the remainder were rated either “A” or “B.” At Flat Rock-Hawcreek School Corp., the overall grade was "B."
Many have said that the letter grades assigned to schools aren’t a fair representation as to the quality of schooling going on in classrooms, arguing that putting so much weight on a test is unfair to both teachers and students.
The current grades could also be considered unfair in that some schools may have improved significantly while others have fallen off the last two years. While test scores aren’t the only thing parents look at when choosing a school for their child, letter grades do influence their decision making.
It remains to be seen whether or not the school year will be able to continue with in-person learning, as thousands of new cases of COVID-19 are popping up across the state daily.
When the next round of standardized tests come back, whenever that may be, it’s hard to know what scores will look like. The pandemic has challenged traditional education in ways never before seen, and it’s unknown how that will translate to testing.
Now is the perfect time for the state to reevaluate, and possibly revamp, its accountability rules in schools and its letter-grading system.
Until a consistent, strong testing system is in place — or new rules are adopted — everyone should look at the current letter grades the same way as Flat Rock-Hawcreek Superintendent Shawn Price: with a grain of salt.
