PHOENIX — The Arizona State Board of Education is overhauling the A-F school grading system, raising the bar for schools and districts to earn top letter grades.
Over the last few months, the board has voted to make changes including raising the proficiency and growth target rates as well as eliminating bonus points.
The state’s current grading system heavily rewards growth — how much a student improves against their academic peer group — not just whether they are actually passing. Other factors include a student proficiency rates as well as graduation rates and more.
“This is probably the biggest thing we've seen in several years,” Sean Smith, the chief accountability office for the Arizona Department of Education, said of the new changes.
Smith said if they were to apply the newly approved metrics to the current letter grades, there would be a difference.
“A 6% decrease in As and we some increases in Cs and Bs stay about the same,” he told ABC15.
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Some of these changes are concerning educators though. Several educators spoke out in the Arizona State Board of Education meeting in late September.
Paul Tighe, the executive director of the Arizona Administrators Association, says he worries about undoing work that was done by a subcommittee years ago, trying to eliminate or reduce the correlation between letter grades and a community’s wealth.
“When you look at a purely proficiency model, that correlates very highly with the socioeconomic status of the community and the students that are in the school. So whereas balancing with growth, if you grow a student more than a year's growth in a year's time, wouldn't that be an indicator of a good school?” Tighe said. “So, the present model has that proficiency and growth balance, as well as other points.”
Another change: each factor that goes into the overall letter grade will also get its own grade.
“There will initially be a decrease in letter grades, particularly in As. but I believe in schools and i think when you raise the bar, schools work to meet that bar,” said Sean Ross, the executive director of the State Board of Education.
While the board looks at the letter grade process every year, the changes this year came after a report from the Auditor General’s Office that said the letter grade system “did not clearly communicate school performance” and that the current metrics that are outdated, with bonus points, could’ve “potentially inflated schools’ letter grades.”
The board will continue to look at more potential changes. The letter grades released in the Fall of 2027 will reflect the new system.
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