INDIANAPOLIS (AP)
— The Indiana Department of Education is reviewing whether A-F performance
grades to schools around the state could be canceled this year because
regulations on setting those grades have expired.
Democratic state
schools Superintendent Glenda Ritz has been an opponent of the rating
system — and its supporters say she is trying to undermine the process.
The (Fort Wayne)
Journal Gazette reported that an Education Department document it obtained
said the A-F system's regulations expired last November, which "creates
legal issues by calculating grades when there is not administrative rule
in place."
The Education
Department has asked the state attorney general's office for a legal
opinion, department spokesman Daniel Altman said.
"What we're doing
is our normal due diligence on rule-making that we do every year," Altman
said. "It gets very technical."
The State Board
of Education, which is dominated by appointees of Republican Gov. Mike
Pence, and Ritz have clashed repeatedly over the school rating system
since she was elected as state superintendent in 2012.
Ritz asked board
members in July to consider not giving lower A-F performance grades to
schools for a year because of an expected drop in student scores on the
ISTEP standardized exam taken last spring in grades 3 through 8 because of
changes to the test standards.
Board of
Education member Cari Whicker, a sixth-grade teacher in Huntington
appointed by Pence, called the department's questioning of the regulations
"a stretch."
"The
superintendent has tried four or five times in the last three years to
negate accountability, so I'm not surprised there would be another
effort," Whicker said.
The school grades
help determine factors such as teacher pay raises and whether the schools
could take state intervention.
A new A-to-F rule
is already in place for the 2015-16 school year, spurred by legislators
who didn't like the current formula. This year was to be the last time the
current formula was used.
The Education
Department is hinging its argument on part of a 2013 bill that called for
the new formula and says an emergency rule adopted under the bill expired
Nov. 15, 2014.
Marc Lotter,
spokesman for the State Board of Education, said the current A-to-F rule
is a permanent rule — not emergency — so he is unclear why it would have
expired.
McGraw-Hill
Education CTB, the state's testing provider, said last month that student
ISTEP scores won't be available until mid-December, meaning the A-to-F
grades wouldn't be issued until early next year.
Betsy Wiley,
president of the Indianapolis-based school choice group Institute for
Quality Education, said she believed Ritz's prediction of a big drop in
student test scores is meant to cause some panic for schools that might
build opposition against the accountability grades.
"They are
consistent in their continued efforts to derail accountability," Wiley
said.
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