The New A-F School Accountability Letter Grade System
This year, Arizona’s school accountability system is transitioning from AZ Learns to A-F Letter grades. Letter grades will be used as just one measure of how a school is performing. With the new A-F system, parents benefit by having, at their fingertips, an easy-to-understand, equitable school grading system when deciding which educational environment best meets their children’s needs. Schools benefit by identifying both areas of strength and areas that need improvement.
To hold schools accountable in a fair and equitable fashion, each school is equally evaluated both on how many of its students are passing AIMS each year and how much its students academically grow each year. Other factors such as dropout rate, graduation rate and English language learner reclassification rate are taken into consideration, when applicable.
While schools cannot control the knowledge level of new students (students starting kindergarten or transfer students), they can affect and are responsible for how much their full-academic year students learn from one grade to the next. The new accountability system measures and compares this student learning on a school-by school basis.
All students deserve a quality public education that moves them academically ahead every year. The new letter grade accountability system measures that progress, grading schools on an intuitive and fair A to F scale. In the end, information obtained from the new A-F letter grade system will serve as an important starting point for parents making decisions about their children’s education.
The new Arizona accountability system is in a transition year. The transition period will last two years. If you would like more information on the new system, the A-F Information Guide can be found
here.
Beyond Textbooks
This year our teachers are using a new digital curriculum resource called Beyond Textbooks. Beyond Textbooks gives our teachers the tools for planning instruction, assessing student progress and collaborating with colleagues.
Beyond Textbooks components:
Essential Standards tell us what the students must learn before they leave the current grade.
Unwrapped Documents summarize the rigor, big ideas, essential questions and evidence of mastery.
Curriculum Calendars keep teachers and students on track for academic success.
Formative Assessments are short assessments to monitor mastery of a concept.
Why Beyond Textbooks?
• Provides a common starting point for all teachers
• Teachers able to plan together
• Teachers across the district are teaching the same Essential Standards to the same degree of rigor
• All the Essential Standards are scheduled before the AIMS tet
• Teachers able to share curriculum resources throughout the district and throughout Arizona