Michigan Senate flunks A-F grading system for evaluating schools

Lansing — Majority Democrats in the Michigan Senate voted Wednesday to end the Republican-authored A-F statewide grading system for evaluating the performance of K-12 schools.

Democratic lawmakers, including Sen. Sam Singh, D-East Lansing, have argued the A-F system, which assigns letter grades and rankings for public schools, is redundant and inferior when compared to the state's other evaluation tool, the "School Index System."

The bill to scrap the A-F process passed in a party-line vote of 20-18. The House approved the measure in March, meaning it will likely soon be sent to Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer's desk.

In contrast to the letter grade approach, the school index system provides a ranking from 0-100 for each school based on student growth, proficiency, graduation rates, English learner progress, attendance rates, advanced coursework completion, post-secondary enrollment and staffing ratios, according to the Michigan Department of Education.

"It was created by parents with feedback by parents," Singh said of the index system. "So it is a transparent system."

As for the A-F system, Singh said it was put in place "at the last minute" as then-Gov. Rick Snyder, a Republican, was leaving office at the end of 2018.

"What we are doing here is doing what we were asked for by superintendents and school boards, the people that are working in our education system," Singh said.

Snyder and Republicans had contended the letter grade system made it easier for parents and students to evaluate schools.

Under the 2018 law, the Michigan Department of Education had to develop a system to assign letter grades to each public school based on student proficiency, student growth, graduation rates, performance compared to similar schools and students who are English-language learners and who achieve adequate growth toward proficiency in the English language.

On Wednesday, Sen. Mike Webber, R-Rochester Hills, said removing the A-F system would make it harder for parents to make determinations about their children's education.

"Michigan's parents shouldn't need a statistics degree to understand how their child's school is performing," Webber said.

The nonprofit Great Lakes Education Project, which often advocates on behalf of charter schools, said the 2018 law was designed "to hold elected officials, local school boards and the state’s public school bureaucracy accountable."

“Senate Democrats voted today to keep parents in the dark about the performance of our kids’ schools” said Beth DeShone, executive director of the Great Lakes Education Project.

Many school officials had been critical of the A-F system.

The Michigan Department of Education has said the grading system "distills the performance of schools into overly simple letter grades" and "relies too heavily on assessment data to the exclusion of other important measures of student progress."

cmauger@detroitnews.com

Staff Writers Beth LeBlanc and Jennifer Chambers contributed.