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 applied: “An LEA will be called for a hearing if it operates one or more public schools that received an F letter grade in two consecutive years or dropped from a grade of D to F in two consecutive years,” Bridal Light said. Using currently available data (not the official window for hearings), staff reported that 24 local education agencies and seven public charter schools would meet those criteria; most affected LEAs would have only one school that triggered the threshold.

The presentation reviewed demographic and climate correlations with letter grades. On average, schools with lower letter grades served larger proportions of economically disadvantaged students and higher shares of Black, Hispanic and Native American students; staff emphasized the strong correlation between race/ethnicity and economic disadvantage in Tennessee. By indicator, the achievement score (weighted 50 percent) displayed the clearest relationship with economic disadvantage and student race. By contrast, the growth indicator showed little relationship with student demographics, while the growth-25 indicator tended to show higher scores in schools with more students of color and English learners. Staff also reported that CCR scores were lower, on average, in schools with more students of color even after controlling for economic disadvantage, a pattern staff said appears linked to differential access to early postsecondary opportunities.

Staff presented climate and staffing signals that correlated with lower letter grades: chronic absenteeism in F schools averaged about 2.5 times the rate in A schools (the statewide chronic-absence average in 2023–24 was 18.9 percent), and teacher retention at the school level averaged 76.9 percent statewide — with D and F schools below that average and A and B schools above it. F schools also had higher shares of inexperienced teachers and a higher incidence of emergency credentials; staff cautioned the available data did not indicate which course assignments those teachers held.

To illustrate exceptions to the trends, staff highlighted three “bright-spot” schools that earned A grades despite challenging demographics: Berks Elementary (Putnam County), Whitehaven High School (Memphis-Shelby County Schools) and KIPP Antioch College Prep Middle School (authorized by the Tennessee Public Charter School Commission). Presenters described strategies in those schools that may be associated with stronger outcomes — leadership changes and five-year plans at Berks, schoolwide literacy and expanded dual-enrollment/industry-certification access at Whitehaven, and intentional vertical alignment, leadership development and investment in English-learner certification at KIPP Antioch — and said staff plan follow-up work to better understand which practices are replicable.

Board members asked staff what additional pre-hearing information would be helpful; members suggested school-level breakdowns by indicator (e.g., achievement vs. CCR), grade spans, how outcomes funding (TISA) is used at the school level, and finer-grained data on the types and placements of emergency-credential teachers. Staff said they would follow up with the Tennessee Department of Education (TDOE) on several items, including whether dual enrollment data could be treated or reported differently in the achievement indicator and whether teacher-retention files distinguish staff who moved into non-teaching roles at the same school.

The session closed with members asking staff to continue developing materials that distill common practices across higher-performing schools so the board and staff can use that information in hearings and guidance. No formal board actions or votes were taken during the learning session.