State Board staff brief members on school letter grades, demographic trends and upcoming accountability hearings

State Board of Education research staff briefed board members during a member learning session on the calculation and distribution of school letter grades, demographic patterns tied to those grades and examples of schools that are outperforming expectations.

Erica Bridal Light, director of research for the State Board of Education, reviewed the framework used to compute school letter grades and the component indicators: achievement, growth, growth-25 (lowest-performing 25 percent), and college and career readiness (CCR). Bridal Light noted that “the school letter grade calculation includes several different indicators,” each scored on a 1–5 scale and combined with weights that differ for K–8 and high schools.

Bridal Light summarized 2023–24 results: 290 schools received an A, 484 a B, 508 a C, 330 a D and 78 an F; several hundred schools were not eligible for a grade because of small enrollment or lack of tested grades. Using two years of letter-grade data, staff said that about 45 percent of schools kept the same grade between the two years and most other schools moved at most one letter grade up or down.

Staff outlined how the board’s proposed accountability-hearings rule (accepted on first reading earlier this year) would be…