Could Michigan students be facing an even greater decline in achievement in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic? Proposals by lawmakers to reduce school accountability and transparency are setting the stage for more poor outcomes in the absence of consistent, transparent and straightforward school performance measures.

House Bill 4166 would decrease school accountability. It repeals a school accountability system that uses letter grades to assess public school performance. Repealing this would make school performance less transparent for parents and the public.

The Michigan School Grades law targeted for removal assigns letter grades to schools based on annual, key performance indicators. These include student proficiency in math and English, student growth, high school graduation rate, student performance compared to schools with similar populations, English Learner progress, absentee rates, standardized test participation and student subgroup performance. The school’s ranking, or grade, gives parents a clear and reliable measure of the school’s overall performance.

Opponents of the letter grade ranking system claim it oversimplifies school performance and duplicates the state’s other school performance measures. But a school’s public-facing performance tool should be simple and easily interpreted. If not, it becomes ineffective at holding schools accountable.

The Michigan Department of Education suggests the state’s Index System – a product of the federal Every Student Succeeds Act of 2015 – can serve as an adequate replacement for the letter grade ranking system. But the Index System is not designed to simplify school performance indicators for the public. In fact, explaining the system required the state to produce a 32-page manual and a separate flow chart.

The index provides school officials with complex data to use in developing improvement and evaluation plans for underperforming schools. A school’s score, which falls between 1 and 100, is calculated based on several performance indicators. While the score may be useful for trained administrators to develop appropriate interventions, it is an arbitrary point value to parents who want to understand a school’s progress.

For example, a parent interested in Allegan High School’s progress can refer to MDE’s Historical Accountability Results and Data webpage. This school’s 2021-22 Index Scores were 55.23 (“Composite Index”), 45.24 (“Growth Index”), 51.4 (“Proficiency Index”), 91.66 (“Graduation Index”), 55.02 (“School Quality Index”) and 99.85 (“Subject Participation Index”). But the score spreadsheet neglects to explain how to interpret these point values.

Conversely, the state’s letter grade ranking system provides parents a clear picture of a school’s progress relative to others in the state. It gives Allegan High School a C for proficiency, a C for growth, an A for graduation rate and a D for “peer compare value,” which is performance relative to schools with similar student populations. A C letter grade elucidates the school’s relative performance and puts it into a context that parents can easily understand.

MDE also touts the Parent Dashboard for School Transparency as an effective replacement to the letter grade system. At first glance, the Parent Dashboard appears more promising than the Index System at clarifying a school’s progress through percentages and graphs. But closer examination reveals little meaningful rationale for the metrics used and data illustrated.

Repealing the state’s letter grade ranking system would not just reduce district transparency. It would also hinder efforts to hold charter schools accountable.

Current state law requires a charter school to close if it is among the lowest achieving in the state for three years. However, the proposal to eliminate the state’s letter grade ranking system would also eliminate this automatic closure provision. This would allow failing schools to remain open – and their pupils to suffer the consequences of a broken system.

This is only the most recent attempt by Michigan lawmakers to reduce school accountability and transparency.

The repeal of the Read by Grade Three retention provision frees schools from accountability measures that exist to improve academic achievement. Socially promoting students to fourth grade when they lack proficiency in reading puts them at risk of falling further behind. The retention provision incentivizes schools to intervene early enough to ensure a student advances to the next grade level – and graduates high school on time.

Teacher evaluations may be the next accountability system to be targeted by lawmakers. It is well documented that quality teachers improve student achievement. Evidence-based teacher evaluation systems are an effective strategy for retaining quality teachers in the classroom. But lawmakers have been watering down the state’s teacher evaluation system for years. And school administrators have largely avoided implementing it in a rigorous and meaningful way.

With students still struggling to recover learning losses incurred during pandemic-era school closures, this is not the time to reduce school accountability and transparency. The letter grade ranking system gives a clear, user-friendly, consistent and reliable picture of a school’s progress that parents and other taxpayers can understand. Repealing this and other performance accountability measures will only make it easier for schools to fall further behind.

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