After five years of delays, the Tennessee Department of Education plans to start giving schools grades on an A to F scale later this fall.
Department officials are still figuring out how those grades should be evaluated, and on Tuesday evening, they heard feedback from school district officials and community members during a meeting at the East Brainerd Annex. It was the sixth out of 10 public town halls scheduled to gather input from across the state.
The letter grades, required by a Tennessee law passed in 2016, were first supposed to be assigned in 2018, but online testing problems followed by pandemic-related disruptions caused the state to repeatedly push back its rollout date. The new grades are expected to be released in November with the annual Tennessee Department of Education report card.
The law requires that the education department consider academic proficiency and student growth, as well as other indicators of student achievement, to determine each school’s letter grade. Proficiency looks at the number of students who met state standards, while growth examines how much students learned compared to where they started.
The department has not yet decided how each measure would be weighted in the final grade. Hamilton County school district officials said it was important to consider nuance when evaluating achievement as students come to school facing different barriers.