The Arizona Board of Education is in the process of making changes to the state’s A-F letter grade system for public schools.
In August, the board voted to get rid of a category that went into the grades, known as bonus points, although some of the components that made up that category could go into other areas that will still be considered. That was the first of what will likely be a series of votes. The final policy decisions could come by the end of the year. That would mean the next set of letter grades would reflect the new criteria.
Karla Phillips-Krivickas is a member of the Arizona Board of Education; she’s also the co-founder of the advocacy group Champions for Kids. She spoke with The Show and began by talking about about how would these A-F grades be used in a perfect world.
Full conversation
KARLA PHILLIPS-KRIVICKAS: I think the priority should be, and this is my personal opinion, should be to provide information to parents, especially in Arizona where we give parents so many school choices. Parents need as much information — this is just one piece of the puzzle — but as much information as they can find to make those really hard decisions.
But over time, those letter grades have become — have served different purposes. For instance, our state Charter School Board uses letter grades as part of their consideration for contract renewals and extensions. It can be a determinant of whether a school gets identified for state improvement services. So there’s some other purposes it serves.
MARK BRODIE: It seems as though, and there was a report not that long ago from the Auditor General’s Office, which found that it’s maybe not serving those purposes, and it’s maybe not giving a real indication of how schools are actually doing.
How did the board feel about this? It seems as though there wasn’t a whole lot of disagreement. The board seemed to agree with the findings and the recommendations here.
KARLA PHILLIPS-KRIVICKAS: Well, I would urge everybody to read our official board response. I’m not speaking for the board.
But I will speak as somebody who’s watched these systems evolve for a couple decades in Arizona and nationally. They evolve. We’ve learned more. We can measure things better, and we learn lessons from other states, quite frankly. And also, the federal law changed a few times that had some influence on how states did this, too. But I think we’re learning better, and we’re trying to do better.
MARK BRODIE: Do you think that the current system is in need of change? I mean, one of the findings of the report was that about three-quarters of the schools in the state got either an A or a B, which seems like a lot for schools to get that high of a grade.
Do you think that the system is ripe for the kind of change that the board is looking at?
KARLA PHILLIPS-KRIVICKAS: I think from a time perspective, it is. Again, we’ve learned a lot more. We’ve watched other states over the past 10 years. We haven’t had substantive changes to the system, calculations even, in quite some time. In fact, there are some items that were part of the current system that when they were incorporated, the board at the time said, “These are things we want to kind of test out and pilot.”
Well, now we’re going back, and that was the purpose of the meeting on Monday, is we went back and looked at some of these things and say, “All right, have these worked over the past — we have 10 years of data?” And of course, we had a big COVID pause, for lack of a better term, which also kind of made it difficult to evaluate how things have gone the past 10 years.
MARK BRODIE: OK. So, I know this is a very complex, complicated formula here,
KARLA PHILLIPS-KRIVICKAS: Oh gosh, you have no idea.
MARK BRODIE: But can you sort of give us the thumbnail version of how the current letter grades are calculated, and then we’ll talk about how that might change?
KARLA PHILLIPS-KRIVICKAS: Sure. And it’s important to note that what I’m about to say right now is not that different across all the states. So they all — every state has some type of system, whether it be a letter grade, a star rating system.
And they’re usually comprised of what we call the six components.
One is proficiency, the percent of students who are proficient on the state test in grade level.
Two is growth, what’s, how schools are moving those kids over a one to three years time.
Three is graduation rate. And graduation rate closure, like are we closing that gap?
And what we also call college and career readiness, which are a variety of like your ACT test scores, your SAT scores, ASVAB, the military prep schools. They look at a bunch of different indicators for that.
And we also have a separate component for English language learners.
And these are things — these are really the only things that we have as a state to look at. And so what’s changed over time is kind of how we weight them and put them all together.
MARK BRODIE: OK. So how are you looking to potentially change this? Like, what changes might be on the horizon?
KARLA PHILLIPS-KRIVICKAS: Well, we are implementing the changes that the Legislature mandated. So the Legislature changed the law that — they made lots of changes, but the one that we’re really wrestling with now, and it’s sticky.
So those six components I just listed, right now, they’re all, for lack of a better term, amalgamated into one letter grade, right?
MARK BRODIE: OK.
KARLA PHILLIPS-KRIVICKAS: So it’s really hard to tell why that school is an A or B.
MARK BRODIE: It’s like having a cake, but not really knowing how much of each ingredient is in it.
KARLA PHILLIPS-KRIVICKAS: Right. And it’s delicious, but what we have to do now is pick apart all those ingredients. So what the law says now is that we have to give an individual letter grade to each of those components. So a school will get a letter grade on proficiency, a letter grade on growth, a letter grade on graduation rate. So the level of transparency for the public and parents is going to dramatically increase.
MARK BRODIE: So if you are a parent and you are particularly interested in one of those components, you will be able to then look and say, “OK, School X in college and career readiness has this grade. In growth and graduation rates, it has this grade.” And then you can, if you care, you can look at the overall, but you can really see each individual component there.
KARLA PHILLIPS-KRIVICKAS: Mm-hmm.
MARK BRODIE: And will the weighting be changed in terms of how all those components make the final letter grade?
KARLA PHILLIPS-KRIVICKAS: That remains to be seen. That’s what we’re working on right now.
MARK BRODIE: How big of a change would you say that will be when it’s fully implemented?
KARLA PHILLIPS-KRIVICKAS: I have no way to predict what the new weights will be, if there’s going to be new weights. We’re not there yet. But just the fact that you’ll be able to see the components separately is a sea change. Some other states have done this. Ohio does this, Texas does this. So again, we’re not the first. We’re learning from other states that have broken them out by indicators or components and giving them separate grades or rates.
MARK BRODIE: I mean, it kind of makes sense. If the whole point is for parents and families to be able to see how a school is doing, to let them see how a school is doing in more areas seems like it would make a lot of sense.
KARLA PHILLIPS-KRIVICKAS: Yeah, because you can have a school that has, let’s say, 60% to 70% of their kids passing the state test, and then you can have a school that is only, let's say, 30% to 40%. But they’re taking the kids that they get, and they’re making amazing gains or growth. And that’s — it’s fair for them to get that credit, and it’s also fair for the public to see that.
MARK BRODIE: I’m wondering, sort of on a philosophical level, like how do we compare schools? Because what happens in one school is unique in many ways to what happens in that school, even if the curriculum is the same, the classes are the same. There are different teachers, there are maybe different policies about getting extra credit or attendance or things like that. So can we really, do you think, compare and evaluate schools this way?
KARLA PHILLIPS-KRIVICKAS: That’s a really great question, and I’ve been giving it a lot of thought, obviously. But again, I can’t stress enough that this is just the latest step or evolution in a system that’s been in place for decades nationally and statewide. So in other words, we’re not making it in isolation. Other things have changed over the past 30 years in Arizona, including all the school choices that we have. But comparing schools is hard.
The other thing that we have now that we didn’t have 10, 15, 20 years ago is social media as much as we do now. We know that a lot of parents get that information from them and from each other. Again, this is just one piece of the puzzle and wasn’t intended to always be just the only gold star that you’re going to get. Schools take great pride in their letter grades or their school rankings, so it’s something that they value as well, because they know that it’s something that they can communicate to parents.
MARK BRODIE: Do you have a feeling or maybe an opinion on how this should work in terms of when the new weights happen and the new system is set in place, do you think that it will still be the case that three-quarters of the schools in the state are getting A’s and B’s? Do you want it to be different than that?
KARLA PHILLIPS-KRIVICKAS: One, I have no way of knowing that. I mean, we’re just starting to see preliminary data based on a lot of different choices, like kind of scenarios that we could make. Even my own personal views on this have evolved over time as I’ve learned and grown.
I mean, how do you measure what is an A school? And that’s really the philosophical question that we have to ask, and we’re going to wrestle with that answer.
MARK BRODIE: All right. That is Karla Phillips-Krivickas, a member of the Arizona Board of Education, also co-founder of the group Champions for Kids. Karla, thanks so much.
KARLA PHILLIPS-KRIVICKAS: Thank you so much for having me.
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