ATLANTA (AP) — It’s getting more complicated to tell how Georgia public schools are faring.
The state Department of Education on Thursday released a full spectrum of school accountability numbers for the first time since the COVID-19 pandemic. But there isn’t a single number to sum up the performance of any one school or district. And that could ultimately mean the end of Georgia’s A-to-F letter grade system for schools and districts.
Discarding that single number accomplished a long-held goal of state Superintendent Richard Woods, who says it’s unfair to measure schools on just one yardstick. Woods won approval from the U.S. Department of Education in October to stop calculating a single number in the College and Career Ready Performance Index.
Georgia was one of a number of states nationwide that adopted A-to-F letter grades for schools. But the system has faced backlash as putting too much emphasis on standardized testing and labeling lower-performing schools as failing.
Woods, a Republican elected statewide, said in a statement that the old 100-point single score “vastly oversimplified the complicated factors that influence school quality.”
“With this change, the CCRPI is more like the ‘report card’ it was always intended to be — encouraging schools, families, and communities to dig into the data and both celebrate achievements and address issues that tended to be obscured by the single score,” Woods said.
Instead, Georgia now publishes only the component parts of the index: academic content mastery, readiness, progression, on-time high school graduation, and whether underperforming groups are closing academic gaps.
And even for those measures, there is no single number to sum up how a district is doing on any component, only separate measures of performance for grades…
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