The Education Commission of The States recently released a 50-state comparison of the nuanced school accountability systems across the country, as well as individual state snapshots.
School accountability systems allow states and local communities to measure progress toward state and local goals, share information, highlight achievement and other gaps in performance between student groups and identify schools in need of additional support or resources.
Under the Every Student Succeeds Act, states were provided additional flexibility to “measure priorities beyond achievement and growth as measured by state assessment results, including English language proficiency, graduation rates, college and career readiness, student engagement and school climate,” the comparison states.
The Education Commission’s state comparison includes 15 data points related to accountability indicators and weights for schools based on the grades they serve, report cards, growth measures, rating systems, identified student groups and more.
Key findings
- States most commonly rate school performance using Descriptive Ratings (13 states), Index Ratings (12 states and the District of Columbia) and Federal Tiers of Support (14 states). Six states use A-F ratings and four states use 1-5 star ratings. California’s Dashboard was the only outlier from these categories.
- At least 22 states include student groups beyond those required by federal law in their accountability systems, including California, which includes homeless and foster youth.
- Student Growth Percentiles are the most common growth measure used by states (24 states and the District of Columbia). California has developed accountability system with multiple measures that uses percentile distributions to create a five-by-five grid that provides 25 results combining “Status” and “Change” to make an overall determination for each of the state’s Dashboard indicators. Status (current year performance) and Change (the difference between performance from the current year and the prior year, or between the current year and a multi-year weighted average) receive equal weight in determining overall performance.
- At least 18 states use or allow districts to opt-in to use nationally recognized assessments for high school accountability. California uses the Smarter Balanced Summative Assessment.
- At least 37 states (including California) and the District of Columbia include a measure of college and career readiness in their accountability system.
- At least 36 states include chronic absenteeism in their accountability system. At least 16 states operate a separate state accountability system. California is among both groups.