It’s Back to the Future time in Indiana with House Bill (HB) 1149 poised to resurrect the “A-F” grading system for schools across the Hoosier state. Assuming it becomes law (and it’s already passed the House, so chances are high), schools will once again be assigned letter grades each year based on a handful of metrics.

How Did We Get Here?

Seven years. That’s how long it’s been since Indiana schools received letter grades. But not because legislation shot down the A-F system. Rather, a series of upheavals got us here. First, the state transitioned from ISTEP+ to ILEARN for its keystone assessment. Test scores dropped precipitously and the state created a grace period so letter grades didn’t crash. Then the pandemic hit in 2020. Test scores dropped even more precipitously. The grace period continued and, even when the pandemic receded, letter grades never returned.

(Time for one of my not-so-brief asides. I question whether it’s the right call to suspend an accountability system entirely due to shifting contexts like a change in test or a whole pandemic. I understand a pause in consequences; for instance, I don’t think it would make sense for the pandemic to trigger a swath of schools being taken over by the state due to poor performance. But evaluation could persist and we would understand why a school academically dropped from a B to a C during the pandemic. And we would hopefully figure out how to support that school in getting back to and moving beyond its previous high water mark. Or, we could more readily adapt the framework to measure more than just raw proficiency and to care more about growth and how well schools are recovering from the pandemic’s impacts. After all, it’s been five years since the pandemic hit. It doesn’t need to take this long to make what ultimately amount to straightforward, marginal tweaks in the grading system like what are being proposed here. Thanks for suffering that commercial break. Now back to the show.)

In the meantime, the state diverted its attention to developing and unveiling its Graduates Prepared to Succeed (GPS) dashboard, which launched to much fanfare in 2022. Meant to provide families and community members with a comprehensive look at every school across the state, my first thought when I rediscovered it in researching this piece was, “Really, that thing still exists?” Instead of just prioritizing a summative letter grade, the GPS dashboard is designed to offer insights about attendance, test scores, demographics, and more. In short, a more holistic and meaningful profile of how a school is doing.

As a result of all this, when the 2024-25 school year concludes, schools will once again receive “null” grades for the seventh year running. But null grades won’t last much longer, given House Enrolled Act (HEA) 1635 (passed in 2023), indicates “IDOE must develop a proposal for a revised school performance designation utilizing an ‘A’ through ‘F’ grading scale based on data contained in the Indiana GPS dashboard.”

How Will HB 1149 Grade Schools?

You might ask, given HEA 1635, why we even need HB 1149? We don’t technically. Except that, at least in my reading, HB 1498 finally specifies what this new accountability framework ought to look like, not just that one should exist.

The push to resurrect letter grades seems largely driven by the state’s admittance that their GPS dashboard, while comprehensive, is not all that intelligible to families. As Dr. Jenner noted in a recent Chalkbeat Indiana piece, “Full disclosure, we are hearing from people who say ‘I just want to know how my school is doing.’”

Page 7 of the bill houses the meat and potatoes of what this accountability framework will look like and specifies that the state board of education must establish the framework no later than December 31, 2025. After that, schools must be assigned letter grades no later than December 31, 2026. The new accountability framework will:

• Be based on data from GPS
• Include IREAD proficiency in the calculation
• Include ILEARN and SAT results in the calculation
• Prioritize higher ratings for schools whose students attain a diploma seal
• Include “high school graduation on track” indicator
• Include other factors the state board determines are relevant

On paper, it’s ultimately not all that different from the previous A-F system with its high emphasis on state test results. I’m not saying that’s wrong, but it is a little weird to wait seven years just to run back the old playbook with a very light adjustment in relation to how high schools are evaluated.

Is There No Alternative?

Which all brings me to the operative, quite thorny, question: “What makes a school good?” Is it test scores? Is it culture? Is it leadership? It is, of course, some mixture of all of those and a whole lot more. It’s reductive to simply boil myriad, complex factors down to a letter grade. The detractors are right about that. But I’ve always felt it’s a good thing to have a shorthand for a school’s quality and in creating any shorthand we must make decisions about what factors can be compared across different school types to arrive at a portable shorthand.

Which leads to another question: “What is the purpose of school?” Because ideally, a school achieving an “A” grade is living up to its purpose while one that scores an “F” is not. Based on the legislation as written, it would seem the purpose of school is to ensure students achieve literacy by third grade, pass ILEARN, pass the SAT, and graduate from high school.

Something I appreciate about a piece of legislation like this is that it forces us to make explicit what we really value in public life. Agree, disagree, or some combination, at least it’s on paper what we believe matters most in terms of what a school is able to achieve.

I’ve always been largely on the side of prioritizing the very factors outlined above in a school’s quality. Before, during, and after my years as an educator, I ran into a lot of families who settled for their school feeling safe, for their student being emotionally supported. But they were also settling for schools that academically didn’t prepare kids for success at a high enough rate. I’m not trying to blame the parents here; they were making logical decisions based on the structure of society around them. And even if they wanted a school that was high-performing academically in addition to being physically and psychologically safe, it oftentimes just simply didn’t exist in close enough proximity to them to make sense as a choice.

Physical and emotional safety are the bare minimum we should expect from a school. We must demand much more. I think an A-F system implicitly does that by tying a school’s “quality” to the academic outcomes its students achieve. If a student cannot read by the end of third grade, that is a profound failure that no amount of positive school culture can make up for.

Now, it’s fair to ask if those more intangible aspects could be measured alongside the hard academic outcomes. After all, it’s work but it’s doable to find out whether a school has a quality culture. Whether its leadership is strong. Whether students are emotionally and mentally supported outside of simply being “educated.” (And perhaps some of that will be included as the legislation allows for “other factors the state board determines are relevant.”)

But choices do have to be made, I do think we need an accountability system for schools, and I’m not mad that this is what it looks like. I just hope it sticks around for a while so we don’t get stuck in a perpetual loop of “null grades” like we have been for the past seven years.