Maryland to Overhaul School Rating System by Next Fall

Maryland is set to release its annual school ratings on Thursday morning, marking the final year of the current methodology before a major structural overhaul begins.

The Maryland School Report Card has existed for eight years, but state education leaders argue the system fails to distinguish between school performance and family wealth. Josh Michael, president of the Maryland State Board of Education, stated that current ratings function primarily as a proxy for income, with high-income schools consistently receiving top scores regardless of other factors. Scott Marion, a former executive director for the Center for Assessment who is advising the review committee, noted that the group is evaluating whether metrics are truly within a school's control rather than being driven by socioeconomic status.

The current system assigns points based on academic achievement, progress, English acquisition, attendance, and curriculum breadth. However, the U.S. Department of Education instructed the state last year to drop the well-rounded curriculum metric because nearly all schools met the standard, rendering the data point useless. That factor previously accounted for a substantial portion of a school's score, a practice implemented initially to ensure schools did not neglect subjects like art and social studies in favor of tested areas. The state legislature recently mandated that academic factors increase from 65% to 70% of the total points available in the star ratings.

The review committee, composed of county superintendents, teachers, administrators, and state school board members, has already discarded the curriculum measure and is currently assessing remaining criteria. They are considering an opportunity measure that would track students in the bottom third of their grade to see if their performance improves year over year. This approach aims to reward schools for helping struggling students, particularly those from low-income backgrounds, even if those students do not pass the state test. Marion said the committee is focused on whether the new results will be useful to schools, while Superintendent Carey Wright has called for greater transparency in how results are reported to the public.

Attendance metrics, including chronic absence rates defined as missing 10% of school days, are expected to remain in the report card. The committee is also developing a method to measure staff quality, which would include tracking teacher absenteeism. The state school board plans to vote on these changes during the winter and spring, with the goal of implementing the new system by next fall when the next set of star ratings is released.