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Maine proposes a weighting scheme that provides a different balance of proficiency and growth depending on the school’s prior achievement.
Schools with higher achievement would have a stronger emphasis on proficiency, while those with lower achievement would have a stronger weighting on growth. While this approach may have some positive benefits, it would implicitly set up different expectations for different types of schools, and it could be a challenge to communicate clearly to educators, parents, and other stakeholders.
Maine’s scaled approach appears to conflict with another place in the state’s plan, where Maine proposes to base 42 percent of an elementary school’s grade on achievement and 38 percent on growth.
Maine pairs a clear, transparent measure of student achievement with a relatively simple growth model.
While the model measures where students advance performance levels over time, there are many uncertainties about what Maine intends to do.
