Sign up for Chalkbeat Indiana’s free daily newsletter to keep up with Indianapolis Public Schools, Marion County’s township districts, and statewide education news.
Indiana’s A-F grading system for schools could be on its way back.
House Bill 1498, authored by GOP Rep. Bob Behning, the chair of the House Education Committee, would require the Department of Education to develop a new A-F grading methodology for schools, based on scores on the third grading reading and state summative assessments — the IREAD and ILEARN. The grading system would also have to take into account high school graduation rates, diploma attainment, and other relevant factors.
The department would need to develop the new metric by December 2025 and issue grades to public and accredited private schools by December 2026.
Though Indiana has long had state requirements to issue letter grades to schools, no grades have been issued since 2018 as the state first transitioned to a new statewide assessment, then dealt with the pandemic in 2020, and finally, unveiled its new Graduates Prepared to Succeed (GPS) profiles of each school’s performance in 2022.
Schools would once again receive “null” grades for the 2024-25 school year.
In testimony Wednesday before the House Education Committee passed the bill unanimously, Secretary of Education Katie Jenner acknowledged that she advocated in 2023 for the state to begin to move away from the A-F grading system in favor of the new GPS dashboard. This system includes information about each school’s test scores, attendance, and more.
Officials’ hope was that the dashboard would provide a comprehensive overview of schools that had been missing from a single letter grade. But Jenner said some parents reported that the dashboard was too complex.
“Full disclosure, we are hearing from people who say ‘I just want to know how my school is doing,’” Jenner said.
But the return of letter grades would revive criticism that the grades rely too much on test scores to determine a school’s performance.
An amendment to the bill would require the primary indicator of performance for elementary and middle schools to be test scores. For high schools, the grades would include other factors, like experiential learning and credential opportunities, Jenner said. The State Board of Education discussed a potential framework for new letter grades at its January meeting.
“Just as students aren’t a single letter grade, neither are schools,” said David Marcotte, executive director of the Indiana Urban Schools Association, which took a neutral position on Behning’s bill. “For the sake of simplicity, we go with a single letter grade, but sometimes we lose out on the accuracy of reflecting the full school.”
Rep. Ed Delaney, a Democrat, said letter grades are not useful and lead to unnecessary jockeying between schools. Instead, Delaney said he’d like to see two grade bands indicating whether a school needs intervention or not, presented alongside test score data.
“Then parents could look and see, does my school need intervention or not, and then how are the kids doing on IREAD, and then decide if that school is good enough for then,” Delaney said.
GOP Rep. Becky Cash also suggested that the information on the GPS dashboard could be simplified. And other lawmakers asked that the state pick an accountability metric and keep to it.
“I fear we’ve got a sense of whiplash where the way we measure school performance is changing, it seems like, every year,” said Rep. Andrew Ireland, a Republican. “Let’s get it done and then stick with the system for years at a time because I really don’t think it’s very accessible for parents if we keep changing the metrics we’re using.”
HB 1498 now heads to a full House vote.
Aleksandra Appleton covers Indiana education policy and writes about K-12 schools across the state. Contact her at aappleton@chalkbeat.org.
