Score:
Louisiana’s A-F school-rating system provides stakeholders with a single, clear, summative rating to understand school performance.
The letter grade rating provides simplicity in school identification, with those schools with a D or F for three years in a row or an adjusted cohort graduation rate less than 67 percent identified for comprehensive support on an annual basis. The state also deserves recognition for identifying schools with excessive out-of-school discipline for targeted support, and comprehensive intervention if they do not improve.
Although Louisiana will prevent schools with low-performing subgroups improvement from receiving an “A” in the school-rating system, this may be insufficient to ensure that overall school ratings reflect the performance of disaggregated subgroups. Some peers felt that Louisiana should consider including a specific weight for each disaggregated group of students to strengthen its A-F letter grades.