Dive Brief:
- Maryland public schools will be graded under a five-star system starting in the next school year, according to the Baltimore Sun. The state’s school board says the new rating system, part of the state’s new submitted accountability plan for the Every Student Succeeds Act, will make it easier for parents to tell a school’s quality.
- 65% of the school rating system will be based on academics, including annual growth for students and how they fare on state English and math exams. The remaining 35% of the grade will be based on outside factors, like surveys of teachers and parents and the rate of absenteeism.
- It remains unclear if such a low weight of academics will be accepted by the U.S. Department of Education after reviewing Maryland’s submitted plan. The ED department recently said that Delaware’s 80% academic weight was too low. Maryland's General Assembly limits academic weight at 65%.
Dive Insight:
U.S. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos’ approach to how valued test scores and academic measures should be weighed in state accountability measures remains unclear as states continue to hand in their accountability reports. Administrators and education officials in states may have initially believed that an ED Secretary like DeVos would offer more leeway in states crafting their own accountability measures, but this may not be the case. Still, though the department pushed back against Delaware’s 80% academic weight, DeVos has in the past bristled at what she has said is a Department of Education with too much undue regulatory power.
Maryland’s diminished focus on the weight of exams mirrors in some ways the move towards personalized education innovations that could be spurred by the rollout of ESSA. States are finding that the law may give them the freedom to innovate, even if the federal government stresses accountability. Maryland school board members may have expressed frustration that they could not heavily weigh academic measures, including test scores, in the five-star grading scale to the degree they desired, but a more holistic approach is more in line with ESSA’s focus, which asks for schools to consider college and career readiness as paramount measures as opposed to a focus on proficiency at a given grade level.