State's School Grade Cards With New Higher Standards Contain Low Marks, As Leaders Warned

by Andy Chow

The state school report cards are out and, just as leaders warned, the grades are much lower than usual, with just a fraction of Ohio’s districts scoring top grades in a key area – student test scores.

Just two dozen out of the 600 plus school districts in the state of Ohio received A’s in the category that measures student test performance.

The Ohio Department of Education raised the standard for what it means to get a good score on this portion of the state report card and state leaders say it’s nothing to panic over.

But Democratic Representative Teresa Fedor of the Toledo area says these report cards have become a confusing gimmick.

“To be direct, there is no educational value to combining varying kinds of test scores and applying arbitrary cutoffs in order to assign letter grades,” says Fedor.

ODE is asking people to look at the whole grade card and to not single out one measure over another.