Having already blown its original deadline to award schools A through F letter-grade ratings for this year, the Arizona State Board of Education plans to vote to extend the timeline.
The board on Monday, Aug. 28, will vote on a new timeline to issue the letter grades, giving board members another month to refine the formula used to calculate the grades.
The A through F labels have been on hiatus since Arizona switched from the AIMS assessment to the more difficult AzMERIT standardized test.
The main issue holding the board up is that under the formula previously considered most schools are clumped together with similar scores, making it difficult to differentiate performance across schools.
The formula called for high schools that earned 70 percent of the points possible to be labeled “A” schools.
For K-8 schools, the threshold would be even lower, with schools that earn 60 percent of the points possible receiving the “A” ranking.
Still, the new formula would have left Arizona with significantly fewer A-rated schools than the last time the grades were issued in 2014.
The proposed delay would mean schools must wait another month, until September 25, before they know how they performed.
The grades would not be announced to the public until October 9.
Superintendent of Public Instruction Diane Douglas at the board’s last meeting on August 18 argued that delaying would harm schools that need to know where they stand to make decisions for this school year.
“At some point you just have to make a decision,” Douglas said after that meeting.
