Alabama’s K-12 schools earned a ‘B' for the 2017-18 school year, up from a ‘C+’ the previous year. The grade was revealed during the state Board of Education meeting on Thursday in Montgomery. The state earned 80 points overall, up from 79 last year.
Alabama Superintendent Eric Mackey said he was happy with the grade, because it shows incremental growth.
“This is mostly the work of our teachers,” Mackey told board members.
Individual school and district grades will likely be online between Christmas and New Year’s Day, Mackey said, meeting the end-of-year deadline required under state and federal law.
When asked what the public should take away from the report card, Mackey urged caution.
“This is a snapshot in time,” he said. “This is a test. It tells you something about a school but it doesn’t tell you everything about a school.”
Gov. Kay Ivey presided over Thursday’s board meeting and said she was glad the report card showed improvement. “It’s important that we have a report card,” Ivey said, “and it shows that the state is making progress on the academic side, but we’ve still got a long way to go, and we’re working hard.”
All but one measure is moving in a positive direction, according to the overall statewide set of measures.
The best grade came in the growth category, where the state’s schools earned an 'A' with nearly 92 points statewide, up from 88 points last year. “We saw both poor schools and wealthy schools,” Mackey said, “that had significant growth."
This is the Alabama statewide report card for the 2017-18 school year, released during the Dec. 13, 2018, state board of education meeting in Montgomery, Ala.
The growth measure is seen as a fairer measure of a school’s impact because it measures where students are and how much their achievement grew from one period to the next. Even in schools where overall student achievement levels are low, schools have scored high on growth.
Points awarded for growth are weighted among four levels this year, a change from three levels last year. Because the points are weighted, it is important to remember that 92 points on the growth measure do not indicate that 92 percent of students shows academic growth. Points are awarded on the following scale:
- Category 1 - 0 points,
- Category 2 - 0.75 points,
- Category 3 - 1.25 points,
- Category 4 - 1.5 points.
Academic achievement was up, too, from 60 points last year to 66 points this year. Academic achievement points are also weighted, meaning points earned are not directly correlated with percentage of proficient students:
- Level I earns 0 points,
- Level II earns 0.5 points,
- Level III earns 1 point,
- Level IV earns 1.25 points
Academic achievement among student subgroups, broken down by race, ethnicity, disability status, poverty status, and English Language Proficiency status, still show large gaps.
The chart below reflects the achievement gap in points earned on the academic achievement indicator on the report card.
| Subgroup | Points earned |
|---|---|
| All students | 66.38 |
| American Indian/Alaska Native | 73.26 |
| Asian | 94.53 |
| Black or African American | 47.78 |
| Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander | 64.5 |
| White | 78.25 |
| Two or more races | 74.47 |
| Hispanic/Latino | 53.44 |
| Economically Disadvantaged | 53.3 |
| Students with disabilities | 30.1 |
| Students with Limited English Proficiency | 45.33 |
“We are really concerned about the achievement gap,” Mackey said, adding, “The most important thing that we as a state department can do is to make sure that our teachers have access to really good professional development.”
Mackey said access to high-quality continuous teacher training differs across the state, and the department is reviewing new models to better serve teachers and students.
The chronic absenteeism measure, which reflects the percentage of students missing 15 or more days of school in an academic year, rose from 17.7 percent to 18.3 percent, meaning the percentage of students who were chronically absent went up---not the direction school officials are working toward.
The graduation rate, reflecting the percentage of students who started ninth grade in 2014 and graduated four years later, in 2018, is 89 percent, up from 87 percent last year.
The percentage of students who were deemed college or career ready, meaning they earned one of the following seven credentials, went up from 66 percent to 71 percent:
- Earning a benchmark score in any subject area on the ACT college entrance exam,
- Earning a qualifying score of 3 or higher on an Advanced Placement (AP) exam,
- Earning a qualifying score of 4 or higher on an International Baccalaureate (IB) exam,
- Earning college credit while in high school,
- Earning a silver or gold level on the ACT WorkKeys exam,
- Earning a career technical industry credential, or
- Being accepted into the military.
A new measure, added this year, shows the progress of students learning the English language and is based on how a student scored on a standardized test for ELL students over a two-year period. At the state level, the measure shows that 42.5 percent of ELL students showed growth over that two-year period.
Mackey praised teachers again while speaking with reporters after the meeting. “I hope [teachers] will take this as a badge of pride and honor, and as they go home for the holidays they can rest assured they’re doing good work on behalf of students.”
Academic achievement and growth scores are taken from results of standardized testing of students in grades three through eight and in the 11th grade. Schools without a grade that is tested will not be given a report card.
Grades from the 2016-17 school year were based on a test the state has now abandoned, the ACT Aspire. The state board of education dropped the ACT Aspire on former state Superintendent Michael Sentance's recommendation that Alabama should create its own test, which it is now in the process of doing.
In the interim, schools are using the Scantron series of tests, which measures growth in an individual student's scores from the start of the year to the end of the year, instead of measuring it from one grade to the next, as the ACT Aspire did.
State lawmakers passed the law requiring the use of letter grades for school and district report cards in 2012. For reasons including a change in which test was being used, the first round of report cards wasn’t released until December 2016. Those had no letter grades and were considered a work in progress.
Critics of grading schools say education is too complicated to boil down to a single letter grade. Proponents say the single letter grade is something parents can easily understand.
The first round of report cards with letter grades, released in February and reflecting the 2016-17 school year, netted the full array of A’s through F’s across 1,247 schools, with lower grades being earned by schools with high poverty levels.
1:25 p.m. This article was updated to include remarks from Gov. Kay Ivey and Alabama State Superintendent Eric Mackey and additional information about the report card measurements.