If it hasn’t already been decided unofficially among Indiana government and education officials, it is probably time for Indiana to completely drop its A-F system for grading individual Indiana schools and start over completely. It just depends on which new version, if any, state leadership decides on.
This is the grading system created originally by former Republican Indiana Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Bennett before he was defeated for re-election by Democrat educator Glenda Ritz, and before he was accused of altering the grading system and thus, improving the grade for a charter school operated by a political ally.
Indiana state and legislative officials have begun various reviews of the grading system, one meant to give Indiana parents a better idea of how their schools compare to other schools.
Many Indiana educators never took to the grading system, an accountability method created by Bennett’s department, so it would seem that this controversy might create an opportunity to do away with it, and return to more traditional way of judging Indiana schools.
Regardless, the Associated Press — which broke the Bennett story — reported Friday that a legislative review has found that Bennett changed the grade for the charter schools as a matter of “quality control.” Perhaps most interesting, they reported that the charter school in question, Christel House in Indianapolis, did not receive special treatment from Bennett.
The A-F grading system seems now to be under examination from all sides. In addition to two reviews, a 17-member group consisting of teachers, principals and superintendents has been appointed to oversee the rewriting of the grading system. It will be co-chaired by Ritz. And even before this decision, Indiana legislators had assigned the state Board of Education with rewriting the grading system.
Surely, many Hoosiers will be asking whether Indiana really needs a system of comparing each Indiana school. It depends. Do they want to know how their individual schools are doing, or do they want to return to the days of guessing how their schools are doing? In our view, education is just too important to be a guessing game.