LANSING, Mich. (Michigan News Source) – Republican Sen. Ruth Johnson has introduced Senate Bill 378 that would reinstate the state’s A-F letter-grade system for the evaluation of schools, something the Michigan Department of Education has opposed.
“Restoring the easy-to-understand A-F accountability system would enable parents to easily see how their child’s school is performing so they can make informed choices about what school is best for their child’s education,” said Johnson, (R-Holly), in a press release. “Ensuring we have effective teachers and giving parents access to information about their local schools are both critical steps to help our students learn and improve educational outcomes.”
School Index Report.
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The state currently provides a “School Index Report” that is convoluted, lacks context and is difficult to navigate. For example, Dibble Elementary School in the Jackson Public Schools is rated on a scale of 1-100 and has an “Overall Index” score of 66.40, a “Growth Index” score of 55.31 and a “Proficiency Index Score” of 64.50. When clicking on the “Overall Index Score”, the page describes an “Index Value” with components such as “Summative Growth”, “Summative Proficiency” and “Assessment Participation” with no explanations of what those terms imply.
Beth DeShone, executive director of the Great Lakes Education Project – a nonprofit education watchdog group – says the state doesn’t want parents to have easily understandable school ratings.
“The Michigan Department of Education has consistently failed to provide transparent and accountable information about school performance for years,” DeShone said in an email to Michigan News Source. “Even when the law required A-F school report cards, the Department dragged its feet in publishing them and made it difficult to find. This Department is more concerned with providing confusing and difficult information that doesn’t help families understand student performance than it is with the literacy crisis facing our children. I welcome anyone that wants to reinstate A-F or other accountability measures for our schools.”
Michigan Department of Education: “overly simple letter grades.”
The Michigan Department of Education openly discouraged people from reviewing the letter grade system when it was passed in 2018.
“With the passage of P.A. 601 during the lame duck session in December of 2018, the Michigan Legislature added an A-F grading system, to be applied to most schools in the State of Michigan,” the MDE stated back in 2018. “The Michigan State Board of Education and the Michigan Department of Education believe this system is not necessary; that it duplicates information that can be found in our highly successful Parent Dashboard for School Transparency; and that it distills the performance of schools into overly simple letter grades. The system relies too heavily on assessment data to the exclusion of other important measures of student progress. Finally, the system was not negotiated with those who need to use it—parents, educators, and other stakeholders.”
In May 2023 the state Legislature passed a law that got rid of the letter grade-base system.