Ever since the 2025 legislative session closed, the Indiana Department of Education (IDOE) has been working on a new A-F accountability system for schools statewide. It’s been seven years since schools last got a letter grade, but they’re about to get one again. And this time, students are going to get graded in the process.

Why the A-F Grading System is Coming Back

In 2023, House Enrolled Act 1635 passed. It indicated that, “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.”

Then in 2025, House Enrolled Act 1498 detailed what this new accountability framework should include and noted schools must be assigned letter grades again no later than December 31, 2026.

Since then, IDOE has gone through rounds of feedback and presentations on the new framework, culminating in the most recent presentation in mid-October. From here, members of the public have until November 17 to offer additional feedback before another public hearing on the proposed framework on November 17 at 11am at the Indiana State Library.

The final framework will ultimately be adopted in December.

What IDOE’s Latest Version of the New Framework Looks Like

On October 15, the IDOE presented their latest draft of the revised A-F framework in a state board meeting. The gist of it boils down to this: 

• The new framework will evaluate individual students across multiple factors, with academic mastery still a top priority (on ILEARN, IREAD, the ACT/SAT, etc.), and assign them a grade out of 100
• Each school’s letter grade will then be calculated by taking the average of all their students’ grades out of 100, with letter grades assigned based on where a school falls (e.g. a B for a school that receives an average of 83 or an F for a school whose average falls below 59)

The IDOE’s slideshow repeated the phrase “multiple opportunities to earn points beyond a single test score.” Meaning, this proposed framework is meant to be a much more holistic view of student success (and in turn produce a much more nuanced letter grade for individual schools) than the previous A-F system.

While the slideshow makes it all seem deeply complex and unintuitive, I ultimately came away thinking this new model looks really good. Consider Slide 27 below, which is a snapshot example of how an individual third grade student would be evaluated under the new system. 

In contrast to the previous A-F grading system where ILEARN (and other annual tests) reigned supreme, this new model aims to take other factors (like reading proficiency, attendance, year-over-year improvement) into account.

Things get even more nuanced than the slide above in higher grade levels (see Slide 28 and Slide 29 for examples of a fifth grade student and a 12th grade student, respectively). And see this one-pager from the IDOE for a snapshot of how students at each grade level will be evaluated. 

What the IDOE is proposing is robust and anchored in multiple factors that matter for overall student success.  

A Promising System, Though Questions Remain

IDOE officials and state board members have emphasized how they hope this new model pushes schools to focus more holistically on a student’s academic needs than just what will help them pass an individual test.

Overall, I see a lot of promise in this new system. But I have two questions.

• How soon will IDOE distribute results to schools?
• What does school-level accountability look like under this new framework?

On the first question, school grades must be assigned by December 31, 2026. That’s according to recent legislation. I have no doubt IDOE will meet that deadline. They have to, after all. But, for me, that deadline just isn’t good enough if we really want schools, as IDOE seems, to do anything with this data.

Receiving overall grades (and the hypothetically more actionable individual student grades) by the mid-point of the following academic year doesn’t really give schools enough of a window to meaningfully act on it. Nor does it help families make real-time decisions about their school options if school grades always lag well into the following school year.

Then again, does it even matter to schools? The point of an A-F system isn’t so much to give schools actionable data (they already have all the data points that make up an individual student’s grade in this framework). It’s to create public accountability. To ensure schools serve their students well and help them advance academically and in life.

Which brings me to the second question. What will accountability look like? Long gone are the days of state takeover for chronically failing schools. I doubt they’re coming back. But I do imagine individual districts and charter school authorizers will begin to look at letter grades as one metric (amid others) to determine the future of individual schools.