Bad report cards won't ruin the Christmas break for Oklahoma schools.
New A–F school grades from the State Department of Education are on hold until at least February as they work out the bugs in a new evaluation system.
Tulsa Public Schools Superintendent Deborah Gist said there are some improvements in store, like measures that account for school growth.
"Our schools are responsible for what happens once they have the students within their care, and it matters tremendously to teachers and to school leaders that they get credit, so to speak, for helping students to make progress," Gist said.
Tulsa Public Schools Board member Gary Percefull noted the system behind the school report cards has changed several times in recent years.
"I haven’t really, over the course of time that I’ve been involved with this work, found the state’s to be very useful, particularly other than bashing schools that are trying really hard over the head with a snapshot of something that happened in the past, and it hasn’t really served to inform instruction," Percefull said.
District officials say the new state report card will better align with their own system to gauge school performance but will still look at just a point in time. The State Department of Education will begin teaching districts about the new evaluation system next month, and public release of new school grades will likely not happen until February.
The last school report cards were released more than two years ago with a note they were inaccurate.
