“What should the philosophical basis of a reasonable grading policy be in our current climate and culture? What should that look like?” CEA President Kate Dias asked other members of the state’s High School Grading Policies and Accountability Index Working Group, which recently convened its first meeting.
The working group is charged by the legislature with a review of high school grading policies and the State Department of Education’s accountability index used to measure school quality.
Grading policies
“I hope we can discuss how to figure out a balance between the desire for equity and the desire for our grades to truly reflect students’ performance,” said Dias, who co-chairs the group with Lauren Mancini-Averitt, president of the Meriden Federation of Teachers.
Dias said that, based on what she’s heard from legislators, she doesn’t believe they are expecting the working group to come up with a universal grading policy.
“In my district, we couldn’t get a universal grading structure in one building—though we were able to get it within a department,” Dias said.
Conversations about grading practices can be difficult because grades are so personal to educators, Dias noted.
“All of us develop classroom philosophies that mean something to us. When I build assessments in the math classroom they reflect what we covered and how much time we spent on each unit. If a kid gets a 32, that means they understood 32 percent of what we covered that semester. When I talk to my English teacher friends, they are more holistic and looking for grades to reflect where their students are developmentally.”
She added, “In my perfect world, when we’re done we will have created something that doesn’t feel like more work for teachers or schools but feels like a reflection of the great work already being done.”
Accountability index
Ideally students’ grades and schools’ accountability index scores would align in accurately reflecting how well students are prepared for life after high school, but unfortunately, the state’s accountability index doesn’t measure much of the important work schools are doing.
CEA President Kate Dias co-chaired the first meeting of the state’s High School Grading Policies and Accountability Index Working Group with Lauren Mancini-Averitt, president of the Meriden Federation of Teachers.
Boards of education across the state have worked to define their districts’ “portrait of a graduate” to guide curricula and student development.
“Legislators want to know what we are measuring and if it aligns with what we say we value,” said Dias. “Some of that came about when our legislators were learning about districts’ portraits of a graduate. These were presented in local districts and legislators then went back to look at school assessment criteria and were going, ‘I don’t see my portrait of a graduate in the school assessment models.”
Due to federal requirements, academic achievement, as measured primarily by SAT scores, is the most heavily weighted factor in the high school accountability index.
Ajit Gopalakrishnan, chief performance officer for the State Department of Education, worked with his staff to develop the accountability index, which was approved by the U.S. Department of Education in 2017 to measure Connecticut schools as required by federal law.
“In our initial proposal for the index we gave less weight to the SAT—the feds would not agree and forced our hand,” Gopalakrishnan said, explaining that federal law requires states to give heavy weight to English language arts and math standardized test scores as well as graduation rates.
He added, “At the high school level in particular academic achievement is so much more than ELA and math alone. Kids are doing coursework in healthcare, manufacturing, and more. Our preparation for postsecondary metric is trying to get at some of that diversity.”
The accountability index for high schools only measures academic achievement, not academic growth, because the SAT is only administered once in high school for accountability index purposes.
Many studies have shown how closely correlated a student’s SAT score is to their family’s income. Seventeen percent of children whose parents’ incomes falls in the top quintile of income in the United States score 1300 or higher on the SAT, while only 2.4% of students’ with family incomes in the bottom quintile do.
Dias said schools in Alliance Districts are going to continue to score poorly under the current accountability index because the areas in which they excel are not measured. Alliance Districts are innovating and trying new approaches to reach students, but those efforts aren’t factored into the accountability index.
“We are not valuing intervention efforts,” Dias said. “Schools are coming up with innovative ways to step in and provide support. Some of our Alliance Districts are doing incredible work to pull students back into schools successfully but we don’t measure that in any way.”
The working group concluded its first meeting with plans to convene two subgroups: one to further explore grading policy and the other to tackle the accountability index. The full working group will meet next on September 19 and must submit a preliminary report to the Connecticut General Assembly by January 2026.
