The West Virginia College and Career Ready Standards are being implemented for the first time in West Virginia schools this fall and so is a new system to grade the schools themselves.
Lawmakers were updated about the implementation of both the new standards and the accountability system during an interim meeting at the Capitol Monday. The system measures the performance of individual schools and gives them an A through F grade based on a variety of factors.
83 percent of a school’s performance is based on growth and student proficiency. The remaining 17 percent is based on non-performance items like attendance, graduation rates, and passage of dual-credit and AP courses.
West Virginia Board of Education member Lloyd Jackson says the grades the schools receive are directly tied to the standards taught in the classroom.
“We can’t constantly be changing our standards,” Jackson said, “Our assessments need to be aligned and they need to be consistent. Our accountability system has to operate over a number of years to be the kind of indicator of growth we want to see, and yes, we have to build capacity in those schools, but in order to know where to do that is to pin it on the results of our system as I’ve outlined to you.”
Jackson says the 2015-2016 grades for schools will be released in the next few months.